My Favorite Social Media Sites

Warning: This is not the end-of all of the best social media for everyone, just the ones that I find interesting, effective, or just plain addictive fun.

1) Path

Path is quickly becoming my favorite social media website.  Its edgier and more personal than Facebook.

Path is a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices, launched in November 2010. The services aims to be a place where users can share with their close friends and family. Dave Morin, Co-founder and CEO, says: “Our long-term grand vision here is to build a network that is very high quality and that people feel comfortable contributing to at any time.” The company began with an iPhone application and a website and released an Android version later (Blackberry application expected soon). The company competes with other social networks such as Instagram and PicPlz.  Based in San Francisco, California, the company was founded by Shawn Fanning and former Facebook executive Dave Morin. Path’s initial $2.5 million funding round included Ron Conway, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Ashton Kutcher,Kevin Rose, Marc Benioff, Chris Kelly, and others.

2) Twitter

Twitter is my all time favorite social media platform.  Once I first started using it when it came out I called it “Facebook on crack.”  It’s important not to treat it like a bulletin board.  If you want to keep up, keep on tweeting or your message will be drowned out.  Noisiest social media platform, but more effective for getting your message out.

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.” Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City.

3) LinkedIn

Social media for businesses.  Great for networking, but no edge.

LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 3 November 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 135 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace. LinkedIn filed for an initial public offering in January 2011 and traded its first shares on May 19, 2011, under the NYSE symbol “LNKD”.

4) Empire Avenue

Fun way to network with friends.  Most “different” platform.

Empire Avenue  is a stock market simulation social network game that allows users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. It started in February 2010 as an invitation-only closed beta before launching to the public in July 2010. Registration and game play is free. Players have their own portfolio in a virtual economy. The price of a player’s share depends on the ticker’s stock buying and selling, along with social networking activity. Players can choose their own ticker symbol. The players can have multiple investors, which will garner them a higher share price, and they can invest in other players. Players win Achievements for their actions, such as advertising and adding services such as Twitter. Players gain dividends from the other shares in players they invest in, which are counted as Credits. Social networks supported by Empire Avenue currently include Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, Wordpress hosted blogs and the player’s own blog and RSS feeds.

5) Facebook

Yawn,… good way to keep track of your parents, kids, etc. No excitement here, but replaces the regular phone calls and postcards to keep in touch.  Not going anywhere for a while.

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends”. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.

6) Instagram

Fun way to share photos online and make new friends.  I find it more interactive than Flickr, but I guess you get out of it as much as you put in.

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a vintage filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr , andPosterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above. The company is based in San Francisco. Instagram, in an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, confines photos into a square shape. This is in contrast to the 4:3 aspect ratio normally used by the iOS device cameras.

7) Flickr

Fun way to share photos online and make new friends.  Best photo sharing platform.  Even if you do not want to share photos pay the membership fee to store backups of your most important photos.

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. Yahoo reported in June 2011 that Flickr had a total of 51 million registered members and 80 million unique visitors. In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources.  Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhone, for Windows Phone 7, and for Android.

8) Tumblr

Your repost images you like the same way you retweet a message on Twitter.  Younger crowd.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website, owned and operated by Tumblr, Inc. Emphasizing its ease of use, the service allows users to post content to a short-form blog, named a “tumblelog.” Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website’s features are accessed from the “dashboard” interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear. As of February 13, 2012, Tumblr had over 44.3 million blogs.According to comScore, it scored 13.4 million unique visitors in the U.S. in July 2011—up 218% from July 2010.Its headquarters is located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.

9) WordPress

Great place to share ideas, photos, thoughts…. 

WordPress is a weblog hosting provider owned by Automattic which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It is powered by the open source WordPress software.It is financially supported via paid upgrades, “VIP” services and advertising. The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser.There are 24 million individual blogs with the service as of July 2011. Registration is not required to read or comment on weblogs hosted on the site, except if chosen by the blog owner. Registration is required to own or post in a weblog. All the basic and original features of the site are free-to-use. However, some features (such as a CSS editor, domain mapping, and storage upgrades) are available as paid options. In September 2010, it was announced that Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging service, would be closing, and that Microsoft would instead be partnering with WordPress.com for blogging services.

10) Google+

Although I’m a “Mac-Guy” I love Google, but I just can’t get into their social media platforms.  Google+ to me isn’t much better than GoogleWave!!!  Take three guys??? Third time’s a charm….Well at least you have YouTube.

Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus, sometimes abbreviated as G+) is a social networking and identity service, operated by Google Inc.

The service was launched on June 28, 2011, in an invitation-only ”field testing” phase. Early invites were soon suspended due to an “insane demand” for new accounts.  On September 20, 2011, Google+ was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation.  It was opened for a younger age group (13+ years old in US and most countries, 14+ in South Korea and Spain, 16+ in Netherlands) on January 26, 2012.

Google+ integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services identified as Circles, Hangouts and Sparks. Google+ is available as a website and on mobile devices. Sources such as The New York Times have declared it Google’s biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook, which has over 800 million users.  Google+ is considered the company’s fourth foray into social networking, following Google Buzz (launched 2010, retired in 2011), Google Friend Connect (launched 2008, to be retired by March 2012) and orkut (launched in 2004, now operated entirely by subsidiary Google Brazil).

On January 19, 2012, it was reported that Google+ had surpassed a user base of 90 million.  According to independent analysis of its growth in December 2011, the site was adding an estimated number of 625,000 new users a day, which may total 400 million members by the end of 2012. The site’s popularity accelerated in December 2011, with almost a quarter of its total user base joining in December alone, said Paul B. Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, who tracks the numbers as the “unofficial statistician” for Google+.

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Sincerely,
Frank Cunha III
I Love My Architect – Facebook