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Social Networking
Aug. 19th, 2008 12:08 pmI've been playing around with Facebook recently, and it's been interesting to compare it to LiveJournal / Flickr / LinkedIn / Ravelry, and what I find compelling in each of them. Livejournal seems vastly better for both long soliloquys and conversations, but is more social than, say, blogspot, which seems to be more designed for Here Is Me and My Blog, In A Vacuum. Facebook is almost more like zephyr in its immediacy (I don't think I'd post to livejournal saying "My feet hurt" - it's too trivial), but also has a lot of interesting connection-y things, like photo tagging. But Facebook also seems also over-obsessive about informing your friends of everythign (Do I really care that someone is playing scrabble again? Does everything have to generate an invite?), and had that debacle of posting whatever you bought at associated sites onto your page.
Ravelry does an amazing job of filling its niche (knitting / crochet / yarn), and is almost the perfect example of why databases rock. Search for everything everyone's made with Yarn X, or in Pattern Y. Get examples of everything made from a particular book of patterns, ranked by favorite-ness if you like. What can you make with 800 yards of laceweight? Well, what did everyone else make? And it has its own mysteries - why does everyone else like the Clapotis shawl so much?
My flickr usage is mostly to stock my ravelry account, so I haven't really explored it very much, and the average flickr user (as opposed to the average ravelry user) probably doesn't care so much about pictures of yarn. And LinkedIn has never really attracted me; I think that's all in the presentation, since I don't really want to consider my friends to be Professional Networking Resources.
Ah well. No real conclusions, but I've been thinking about it, and having decided that LiveJournal is for soliloquys, I felt compelled to make one. :)
Ravelry does an amazing job of filling its niche (knitting / crochet / yarn), and is almost the perfect example of why databases rock. Search for everything everyone's made with Yarn X, or in Pattern Y. Get examples of everything made from a particular book of patterns, ranked by favorite-ness if you like. What can you make with 800 yards of laceweight? Well, what did everyone else make? And it has its own mysteries - why does everyone else like the Clapotis shawl so much?
My flickr usage is mostly to stock my ravelry account, so I haven't really explored it very much, and the average flickr user (as opposed to the average ravelry user) probably doesn't care so much about pictures of yarn. And LinkedIn has never really attracted me; I think that's all in the presentation, since I don't really want to consider my friends to be Professional Networking Resources.
Ah well. No real conclusions, but I've been thinking about it, and having decided that LiveJournal is for soliloquys, I felt compelled to make one. :)
