Forms of Social Media That I Use

"no denial" by Don Solo

Social media is a pretty big aspect of my life. I currently use social networking websites and social music websites on a daily basis. Other forms of social media that I might use occasionally would be blogging websites, wikis, micro-blogging applications, and livecasting websites. I know it sounds like a lot when put into those terms, but it really is not, and many of those types are pretty easy to use.

Like most people, I use both Facebook and Twitter for social networking. These allow me to catch up on various friends, acquaintances, and brands. Like the name suggests, it allows me, the user, to network socially.

Nowadays, most people, at the least, have a Facebook page. I don’t have the phone numbers of more than half of the friends on my Facebook, so because of Facebook, I can send out messages and wall posts to contact them. Facebook gives me the opportunity to have many of my contacts all in the same place, and with the power of technology, I am able to sync my Android phone book to my Facebook phone book to retrieve missing phone numbers. The same goes for Twitter, except instead of messages and wall posts, I can use @mentions, and direct messages.

In this rise of social media usage, the music industry is currently heading into an interesting direction. There are all of these new applications emerging in this movement that industry experts would call “Music 2.0”. What I really like about these applications is that they’re rather fun to use, and it allows for people to discuss, and legally share music in an easy way.

Soundcloud allows listeners to leave comments at a specific second in a song stream, so that other listeners can see what impresses/disappoints others. It gives artists an easy way to embed their own music into their own websites, and offer free downloads to fans. I like this because there’s nothing like it, and it is simple. Offering hundreds of free downloads is a plus too.

And then there’s Spotify, which is known as be a very social music application. So social, that in the last year, the company had partnered with Facebook to allow users to link their accounts together. This allows you to easily sync your Facebook friends with your Spotify friends list, so that you could have the ability to see what your friends are listening to via their published playlists, and personal charts of most played music.

Another great thing about this partnership is that it gives both non-users and users the chance to see what other users are currently listening to through Facebook’s ticker option. I like all of this because I could see what’s new, or buzzing with my music industry friends, and then I could share it with my other less informed friends.

I blog quite often, and when I do, I use WordPress. Currently, I use WordPress for my contributions at Christian Music Zine, this very same blog, and my own personal blog. What I like about WordPress is that I can get away with saying more than what I would normally say in a status update on Facebook.  Wordpress just has the ability to make everything look good, and read nicer than a plain-old MS Word document.

I, like many other students, occasionally use Wikipedia for “research.” In case if you didn’t happen to know, Wikipedia is a wiki site based off of an encyclopedia. It allows users to collaborate through creating, adding, and removing content to different articles. I really like Wikipedia because it has many posted facts of things that I could use for a quick reference while in the early stages of paper writing. It lets me get a broad, although sometimes unreliable, perspective on a subject.

Microblogging is a great idea to me. I use Twitter (perhaps the most famous microblogging platform) to tell the world, or at the least, my subscribers, whatever is on my mind at the time. The “micro” in the prefix shows that tweets come in 140 characters or less. I know this is the second time that I’ve mentioned Twitter, but that’s the great thing about it. It’s usable as both a social networking site, and a microblogging site.

Livecasting is a fun idea, because it gives the world a way to share videos with each other. Whether or not the videos are actually owned or created by the uploaders is disputable. But that’s what makes it interesting. Ever wanted to see a 10 minute mash-up of all of the funniest moments of your favorite comedy series? Because of YouTube, you can.

Other forms of social media that I would like to get into more would be photo sharing applications like Instagram, and location based social networking sites like Foursquare. The only thing that really holds me back from this is money, as I don’t own an iPhone, or a phone with a solid 3G network.