Data centres to off-centre opinion

I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to the beta of Threadsy. In their own words: threadsy is the world’s first integrated communications client! it combines your existing email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts into a unique, enjoyable experience.

Earlier this year I wrote a post asking for just such a thing, however now I’ve got it I’m faced with the question of trust. Do I trust Threadsy with my usernames and passwords for Twitter, Facebook, Live Mail etc? How do I know Threadsy is legitimate & secure? The answer is I don’t. I have to make up my own mind based on their privacy policy and reputation. The one thing they have going for them is the fact they were featured on Cnet – a site I do trust. In other words, trust by association, which is just like life: you build trust through recommendation/association and experience.

Whilst I have a LinkedIn profile, I’m not an addict. I’m not the sort of person who upon meeting someone new immediately sends them a LinkedIn invite. This makes expanding my network a long-term process, however I just stumbled on Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki. Even though most of the ten are relatviely obvious, its well worth a read. I immediately adopted a few of his recommendations.

Its impossible to avoid the massive growth of social networking sites on the internet, but what is it all about?

I remember my ex-boss Arvindra Sehmi asking me what my Facebook ID was in the middle of 2006, at the time my response was something along the lines of I’m not a teenager so why would I have an account? This reflected my perception at the time but I went ahead and signed up for an account anyway, you gotta keep the boss happy don’t you?

Stephanie already had numerous accounts on social networking sites such as Beebo and MySpace and all she did was seemingly write short messages to friends. I simply didn’t get the point, especially considering all her friends had MSN Messenger.

Having signed up for a Facebook account, I realised it had a very different demographic – more mature and plenty of professionals compared to the teenagers who dominate MySpace and Beebo. The audience felt more like LinkedIn than MySpace.

I’ve never been a social butterfly, preferring to have a few good friends than a ton of “people who I’ve met”, however my social network in Facebook is far broader than my physical network. Or maybe thats just because Facebook shows you a list of “friends” whereas I’d only list a few people I count as friends when asked.

So, what does Facebook (or other social networking sites) actually do? This gets us to the point of this post (finally, you might say): simply put, it lets you find people and share information/pictures/thoughts/plans. For example, I worked at Glastonbury a few weeks back, a friend of Robs took a ton of photos and then posted them to Facebook – he also tagged the people in the photos, so Facebook helpfully emailed me to tell me I was in some new photos. I can then go to these photos and comment on them or even tag more people in them. The real clever thing about Facebook is the ability for new applications to be added by anyone. For example, there is an application called Cities I’ve Visited which presents you with a map upon which you can place pins recording the cities you’ve visited for all your friends to see. Another application lets you send a greeting card to people e.g. for their birthday or Christmas. Each time you add an application, you can invite your friends to use the application too.

LinkedIn is a different kind of social network: its aimed at building and maintaining a purely professional network, often to find a new job.

You can find me on Facebook and LinkedIn, but you’ll have to sign up for a free account to see my full profile: I don’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry sneding me messages or adding me to their friends list do I?