Online Social Networks

Social networks are one of the more interesting phenomena of the Internet Age. Do you understand them? I must admit that I don't.

AOL has announced that it's selling Bebo and that made me start thinking. I used to go to Internet safety meetings with Bebo, Facebook and MySpace people back in the mid '00s when they were coming into being and thought they were interesting concepts that wouldn't catch on. OK, I was wrong. I've been on Facebook since those early days and still don't 'get' it. I use MySpace to keep up to date with the doings of my favourite bands. I joined Twitter a couple of years ago and have only just started twitting or tweeting regularly in an attempt to 'get' it. It's certainly useful to keep up to the minute with news and stuff, but what else?

That made me think of Last.fm, one of the music-based networks (and you can see my most listened to albums in the quilt in the right-hand column to this blog). I suppose I'm a bit narcissistic about Last.fm - I don't use it to interact with other music lovers, I use it to keep track of what I'm listening to. It doesn't tell the whole story since it only records those songs I listen to online or through my iPod, not the music I play on my stereo, but it's pretty representative. I'm not sure how to use it as a social network, really.

But I do find it fascinating to look at band pages and see how many times they're played - I'm listening to Garbage at the moment and I was surprised to see that they've been played over 22 million times by nearly 1m listeners (I've played them 102 times in the last 2.5 years). I find that rather astonishing. But I've no intention of interacting with any other Garbage listeners to try to understand that - that's too much like hard work for me.

Rather than being a passive recipient or observer of online social networks I ought to start engaging more. So watch out!