SocialOnTheWeb

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The other day I read a very interesting post from Mark Dykeman’s Broadcasting Brain that asked “Is blogging for the introverted soul?” This subject hit very close to home for me, as I am the most introverted and shy person I know. Sometimes I even have problems being around people who I have known since I was in diapers!

This post by Mark has inspired me to publicly explore a bit on why I am involved with social networking and blogging. This is something I have been doing quite a bit of thinking about my introverted soul and how it has interacted with the Plurk vs. Twitter excitement of the past few weeks.

I had plurked and plurked and got the holy grail of the emoticons, I had the 10 invited friends and even greater than 50 Karma and then the algorithm changed and I was supposed to continue plurking like I did at first if I wanted to maintain my status, which does make sense, but people were even being penalized for sleeping at night, there should be some leeway, shouldn’t there? What was I going to do when I went away for vacation to Disney World in September? What about the fact that I don’t really want to chat all the time because I have so many other things to keep me occupied not to mention the fact that I am so unbelievably shy and just hate putting myself out there in such an open forum.

So anyhow now a few more days have passed and I was checking out the latest in the Twitterverse and saw that there is another new kid in town, Indenti.ca.  Odd one, huh? Aside from not having all the birdies and being so blue, it really looks a lot like Twitter.  There is one difference, it is new. The page loads a bit slowly, but so far I’ve not heard anything about crashes or pages not loading at all. Another thing to consider is that everyone is not using it yet. It’s still in early adopter phase.

So in a matter of less than two hours, I have gone from avoiding social media because of the Plurk burnout I experienced to signing up for new services and even Twittering and Stumbling like normal.

Now although I am finally finishing up this post that I started almost a week ago, I can say that my outlook has changed in the last couple of hours. It isn’t that there is a new shiny out there to play with, because I have gone back to the old familiars that I had been ignoring for the past week or two. It’s just that this new shiny has been able to remind me why I like playing with all of these social networking sites. I may be an introvert in real life, but I do like connecting with other people and doing so online is so much easier to get the courage to talk to the popular kids. I just need to remember that no matter how pretty the next new shiny is that comes along, with all things, moderation is the key!

There are a ton of social news aggregators.  The most famous, of course, is Digg.  The most used at this point is probably Yahoo! Buzz.  Then there’s Reddit, Fark, and a whole slew of niche sites devoted to socially aggregating online news.

So why do we need another one?  SocialMedian is just such a service that is currently in Alpha.  I’ve been a member for awhile, and while I don’t use it every day, I use it a lot more often than I tend to use Digg or Reddit.

You see, I’m just about Dugg out.  I’ve Reddit all.  (Okay, I’ll stop with the Farking puns now).  SocialMedian, is, to me, a change from the other services.  First of all, it’s cleaner.  I like the way it looks and feels.  But that’s not the only reason I like it.

You see, on Digg and Reddit, I have to work REAL hard to get anything to the front page.  I don’t feel that way at SocialMedian.  Of course, part of that is because it’s in Alpha, so not as many people are there.  But that’s not the only reason.  You don’t have the cliques that you have on other social sites.  At least, not yet.

My favorite feature is the ability to receive emails about what is being dugg, err, “clipped”, in the categories I find interesting.  You can also create your own categories, which are called News Networks.

SocialMedian is a work in progress, and I check it out every few days to see how it progresses.  I really like the direction it is heading, and I hope that it possibly slips under the radar and gives the larger social news aggregators a run for their money.  There’s plenty of room for innovation there, and SocialMedian might be just the people to do that.