Talking to a whole slew of people at once through social networking.
Every time a holiday comes, we always promise to keep in contact with each other and we never do.
In the old days we were supposed to sit down on Sunday and write letters to all the people we knew to keep them updated with our daily lives. It’s odd to see how we communicate now on the internet. In many ways we don’t. We lead fractured, multi-tasking lives with very little time to update our friends and family.
This year, the big buzz word is “Social Networking”. It may be hard to pin down what it really means, but when you talk about sites like Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us and Digg, you are getting close. The idea today is that websites are no longer locations that represent one person or entity. Now sites are made up of communities of people who all interact. Sites like Facebook have pages for Millions of people. Each person updates their page and interacts with others on the site. Every time my niece updates her Facebook page I get a notice on my Facebook page.
The interesting thing to know is that we can keep up even better with our frends and family than before the days of the web. We just have get used to talking to everyone at once. These days I have a blog at lancewig.com, a Twitter account that lets me ‘micro-blog’, a photo gallery over at Flickr, a Del.icio.us account to show my freinds what web pages I’ve bookmarked, and of course a Facebook account to find old and new freinds.
I try to get into the habit of making posts that everybody can enjoy. I can still write more personalized emails and instanst messages to one person, but blogs and social networks are great ways to give everybody the ‘family newsletter’ when time is short.
If we all work a little harder at using social network tools, we can communicate much better AND embrace new technology at the same time.