Facebook, Linkedin, ASmallWorld: likes and dislikes

Believe it or not I have lived 31 years of my life without the need (and almost the knowledge) to belong to any social network. Well, this is almost true, except for the fact that I have been registered to Linkedin for several years already, however, is Linkedin considered a social media?

Then last year I discovered both AsmallWorld and FaceBook. I must admit it was a nice discovery. For the first time in a long time, I started to really enjoy the Internet again and moreover, understand the meaning of a word that I often use with my clients…”engagement”…yes…the feeling of belonging to a community that is alive and responsive. Now, after almost one year of active usage of “social networks,” I feel I can share what I like, dislike and why not, even some interesting figures too.

AsmallWorld, for those of you who happen to be members of it know for a fact that it is a “closed” community. Closed in the sense that you get in by invitation only. It was established to be the “upper class” social network, where most of the original members were male, decision makers; CEOs, MDs, entrepreneurs and pretty girls. Also, judging by the quality of the pictures of the pretty girls you can tell they were not poor either. Over the years, AsmallWorld has been releasing “invitation rights” to the most active or selected users and the community has grown while the user profiles have slightly changed becoming “less established” for the male audience, (and that’s when I was invited to join in), fortunately maintaining the quality of girls higher than that of any other social media.

Lots of people criticize the “quality” of ASW’s platform and indeed, compared to FaceBook, it is poor, but I still like it and I find the community genuinely responsive and SPAM free. I mainly use it for recruiting people onto 77Agency or for getting recommendations on cool bars, restaurants, hotels around the world. I also find the possibility to browse any user’s network very cool, although I think it has been removed. However, when I met ASW’s CEO in New York he told me they were bringing it back.

What about dislikes?…hmm…there’s nothing I really dislike about ASW…I’d just improve some of the usability aspects and introduce some new features to make it more web 2.0, since the existing platform is currently a perfect example of web 1.77; it definitely needs a few tweaks to become more engaging and “boost” an active usage.

Active usage; this is a good way to describe FaceBook and indeed I use it quite actively, but ignoring the initial euphoria that pushed me into trying many, many widgets (at least I try not to spam my friends), I mainly use FaceBook to build up my photo albums and keep in touch with friends from all over the world. And when I say ‘keep in touch’, I mean looking at their pictures which graphically brief me about their lives, families, friends. As for keeping in touch, I use emails, as well as, Skype. Although I think FaceBook is the absolute best for this purpose, and if you read about the growth of Facebook in this article, you will understand how true this all is.

As far as any dislikes, I am starting to get really annoyed with the far west - cowboy approach of the FaceBook widgets that are FULL of crappy advertising. This is bad example of moderate and targeted usage of it, instead it should be VALUE, and I am sure they are working on this.

Finally, when I said on my opening statement, whether Linkedin was a real social network or not, I was only joking, but I have to say I don’t find it “engaging” at all. Instead it seems more like a good directory rather than a social network. Perhaps it is just the way in which I have used it that makes me think of it in this way, its only my personal perspective. I invite you all to look into this article to read more about Linkedin’s traffic growth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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