Dotmad.net

More than 2 years ago, Ayelet Noff (AKA Blonde 2.0)  wrote a post on social networks vs. blogs (with Myspace as an example for a social network). She claimed there is room for both in the life of a blogger.

I disagreed with her:

“Blogging takes effort, time and at least a little talent.
MySpace requires choosing a template.
Blogging is about sharing your view, opinions and (some times) personal life with your readers.
MySpace is about sharing links to your “friends”, meaning other pages in which the only meaningful data is links to more “friends” and so on.
(Why do I use quotes? ask Samy)

If a blog is the equivalent of an autobiography, MySpace page is the equivalent of a phone book.”

And

“I think that with some social networks (MySpace again) you need to do most of the work OUTSIDE the site by mails, IM, phone, etc.
In other words, the SN site itself gives very few tools to help you make new friends, while a blog gives you information on the writer on it’s own.

Bloggers must invest more effort, while people on social networks can do it.
The result is that the chance of encountering a social network page containing meaningfull information is lower.
Blogging has a much higher entry bar than most social networks.”

Funny reading it now.

I can’t image my life today without social networks. I’m still not using Myspace, but constantly use Facebook and Twitter. I have met many fascinating people through social networks, went to events I would have never heard of without them, and learned a lot using them.

In fact, using social networks to that extent also affected my writing, as after channeling creativity using Twitter I’m often left without any for a new blog post. On the other hand, I have recently wrote a post on my Hebrew blog, posted on Twitter - and got a tremendous response, as people liked the content and promoted it on their own.

In fact, the focus of the problem today has shifted from “Social networks vs. blogs” to large vs. small communities on social networks, but that’s a topic for another post.

• Still learning how to properly use Twitter (any tools recommendations?)
• Facebook seems to be using 100% CPU on my home computer for each page load
• Removed the “Blog RSS feed reader” Facebook application - it stopped updating the feed some time during TechEd and never recovered (even removing the feed and adding it again didn’t help) - now I’m trying the “Simply RSS” application instead

I took a look at the Facebook countries stats, and it got me curious about possible correlation between Internet users and Facebook users, so I collected Internet users stats and came up with this (absolute numbers are in Thousands):