The social network I’m enjoying most at the moment is Facebook. And for a very simple reason: it isn’t centred around accumulating a list of strangers and calling them friends. When I initially signed up for Facebook, I allowed it to rifle through my contacts and see who else I knew was already a member. Interestingly, it showed up a list of people I’ve spoken to in the past – Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, Mick Fealty from Slugger O’Toole, a number of publicists I’ve worked with for Unreality TV and many more.

I’ve enjoyed the way Facebook allows you to keep up to date with friends and colleagues. OK, the new applications are getting a little bit annoying, but I reckon that’ll settle down once the novelty wears off!

I really like the fact that you don’t have to accept everyone as a friend. Using a social network this way keeps it relevant and that’s where the most value comes out of a social network like Facebook. I wonder if someday people will print their preferred social networking addresses on business cards. You can bet that’s probably happening already.

Connecting With Me On Facebook

If we know each other and you want to hook up on Facebook, here’s my Facebook profile page.

Other Social Networking Sites

What other social networking sites have you used, and which do you prefer? I’m on LinkedIn, but I have to say it’s not nearly as interesting as Facebook. Plus any site with a premium subscription model turns me off right away. *cough* I’m looking at you Friends Reunited…..

Digg, as you know is one of the leading social media sites. It attracts reams of visitors each day and a popular story can cause a surge of visitors to a website that can sometimes crash the web server. This is known as the ‘Digg Effect’.

Somewhere along the line, an open source clone of Digg appeared called Pligg. Pligg allows you to set up your own Digg-like website. Ohhh, instant riches! Fame and glory in your little web community. Not to mention the babes you’ll attract…

Community Building Takes Work. Hard Work.

Building an online community is not an easy task. If you’ve got the dollar signs in your eyes and you want to make fast money, a Digg clone is not for you. You’ve got to:

• Choose a niche. There are already a ton of dominant social media sites. You’ll never overtake Digg using clone software. Logic dictates that you’re better off choosing a niche and focussing on that. Add value to your site by linking to valuable resources.
• Design and brand the site – look too much like Digg, and you’ll look like a cheap imitation. If they wanted Digg, they’ve gone there.
• You’ll need to promote the site. That means advertising dollars and other types of promotion around the niche you’ve chosen.
• You need to build a user base. Or were you planning to be the sole contributor to the site? You can only find and link to so much content on your own. It’s the community element that makes these sites work.

All this is leading to an excellent post over on Upstart Blogger about the myths surrounding setting up and running a Pligg site. If your thirst to be the next Kevin Rose is close to insatiable, you might want to read this first. It won’t happen overnight.

Some, like del.icio.us are no-frills, serious bookmarking tools. Others, like Digg are places where links get submitted and community discussions form around the pages that are submitted.

But for over a year now, there’s been a social bookmarking site that beats the spartan design of del.icio.us and has a raft of community features to beat the likes of Digg. The site I’m referring to is ma.gnolia.

Better Design

Where del.icio.us sports a utilitarian design, ma.gnolia is built for comfort. Instead of being harsh and high-contrast, the design employs pastel colours and is strikingly people-centred. Virtually everything has an avatar associated with it.

Less Focus On Populists

I wouldn’t say ma.gnolia is impervious to spammers. However, it places a lot less emphasis on popularity of links which makes it less attractive than Digg or Reddit as a place to drop potential linkbait.

More Focus On Community And Discussion

There’s a little feature ma.gnolia has that I’ve never seen anywhere else – Give Thanks. No, it’s not a cue to start praying! If you see a useful link in someone else’s bookmarks, you can click a Give Thanks button and they get a little message. It’s a great social feature, and a nice way to foster community. I’ve been thanked about three times now, and I’ve thanked quite a few users myself.

The community revolves around people and groups. Needless to say, you can establish connections with individuals in the usual friend/contact list manner. You can also create or join special interest groups. That’s where all the conversation happens.

The groups basically act as forums for specific topics. You can also submit links to a group. This can be useful, because if you come across an excellent web design resource (for example), you can recommend it to the group.

RSS Features and Blog Integration

There’s a full range of RSS feeds available in ma.gnolia. You can subscribe to the bookmarks of other users, and you can also subscribe to bookmarks by tag or by group.

The easiest way to integrate your ma.gnolia bookmarks with your (WordPress) blog is to use the RSS sidebar widget. Alternatively, you can use the Postalicious plugin to scrape up your recent bookmarks and post them as an entry on your blog, which is what I do here.

Give ma.gnolia a go…

All that remains is for you to give ma.gnolia a go. If you sign up for an account, don’t forget to add me as a contact! Remember, if you’re a del.icio.us user transferring across, you can always import your existing bookmarks and tags.

Paul’s post is an excellent introduction and carries instructions on how to use RSS feeds in the real world, including help on setting up Bloglines, My Yahoo, Google’s personalised homepages and many more free RSS reader applications.

Definitely worth a look.

On a related note, RSS technology must be starting to infiltrate the business world to some degree. I read a blog this morning that actually used the phrase “feed management”. Only in the corporate world…..

Update: If you’re still having trouble understanding the concept of RSS, Colin at Uber Geeks has posted a good entry-level description of RSS or, Web Feeds as they’re likely to become known.