Social Bookmarking takes this process one step further and breaks all barriers and shortcoming associated with using local favourites.  Here are some of the caveats to Internet bookmarking via the “legacy browser method”

• Bookmarks saved in your preferred browser are local to that computer/browser.  If you operate on multiple computers on a daily basis, accessing Internet favourites stored on another machine is problematic.
• Bookmarks cannot be easily shared between your peers.  This is where social bookmarking really comes into play allowing you to easily share your internet favourites in the same way that the world wide web and in particular web 2.0 has allowed us to easily share photos, videos, blog posts and other meda quite easily.
• Most browsers including Internet Explorer restricts you to organising your Internet favourites in folders or categories.   Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags allowing to apply multiple tags to a single web page that has been added as a favourite.

There are a number of Social Bookmarking services including Delicious, Digg and Stumble Upon, with today’s focus on my favourite being Delicious.

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks and pioneered the use of tags.

As an example, my Delicious account which is publicly shared (you can also set it to private) can be accessed via http://delicious.com/georgekhalil

You will notice that most of favourites would commonly have a number of tags against it which makes it a lot easier to search for and locate at a later date.

So what are you waiting for?  Sign up for a delicious account at no cost and begin saving your bookmarks to the “cloud”.  This will make your bookmarks available anywhere at any time.  Once you have your friends on board, you can subscribe to each other’s bookmarks promoting bookmark sharing.

You can signup for a new account here.

Happy bookmarking

So this is how it works.  When updating your status you can “tag” other users by using the @ symbol and then the person’s name.   Facebook goes one step further and will generate auto-suggested drop down based on what you have typed after the @ symbol.

The tagging feature or @mention isn’t restricted to your friends.  You can pretty much tag anything in Facebook including pages, groups, companies, brands, artists etc.

So let’s see it in action.

I’m surprised this wasn’t introduced earlier in the piece considering Facebook’s popularity and adoption, but never late than never.

You can read more about it on Facebook’s blog here.

In summary, here are some the statistics coming out of this revolution!

Social Media in general

• 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology
• 2/3 global Internet population visit social networks
• 4th most popular online activity ahead of email

Facebook

• More than 250 million active users
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• 1,000,000,000 amount of content (weblinks, news, stories, blogs, posts,photos) are shared on facebook each week

Twitter

• Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February this year
• Approximately 3,000,000 tweets a day

YouTube

• 13 hours of video uploaded every minute
• 100,000,00 videos viewed each day

Enjoy the short video below which by the way has great music behind it “Right here Right now” by Fatboy Slim.

Can we say that social media is not a revolution but actually a way of life?  Let me know what you think…

Twitter can also be  a way of networking with your peers and sharing information and knowledge which usually includes a short URL to a blog post or article, hence Twitter is also referred to as a micro blogging service.  As an example, upon completion of this post I will share this article via a number of social networking sites including Twitter using a short URL service such bit.ly or tinyurl.com which links my tweet back to this post.

Now back to the basics.  Users of Twitter send and read messages known as “tweets” which are text based only.  Each Twitter account has a profile page which lists the user’s “followers” (or people that have subscribed to your account) and “following” (people that you are following) and a “Bio” (short for biography) where you have up to 160 characters to promote yourself, your skills, your interests to everyone else in the twitterverse.  You also have the ability to upload a profile picture, your location, a URL to your blog or personal site such as Facebook or My Space and your real name.  In addition to your real name you also have the opportunity to select your “vanity” URL such as http://twitter.com/socialtechgeek

Once you have have your profile complete you are ready to begin following others by clicking on the follow button of another users profile such as in the below example of Oprah’s profile. You can easliy do a people search within the web based interface of Twitter and follow your friends, other tweeps with similar interestes and your favourite celebrities ofcourse.

I personally have 2 Twitter accounts with the following Biographies targeting two different audiences;

@socialtechgeek or http://twitter.com/socialtechgeek – Ramblings on social media, everything techie and everything in between. I’m a MAC and a PC.

@georgekhalil or http://twitter.com/georgekhalil – SharePoint, Exchange, MCITP, MCTS, Blogger.

The latter is more personal and targeted at IT Pro’s whereas @socialtechgeek feeds of this blog amongst others providing you with up to the hour updates with regards to everything of geeky nature.

Just to provide you with some statistics on Twitter’s splurge into the social networking arena, Twitter is now ranked as the fastest-growing social networking site for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, way ahead of Facebook which had an increase of only 228 percent.

So what are you waiting for?  Sign up for a Twitter account and be sure to follow my tweets on either @georgekhalil or @socialtechgeek or both. In upcoming posts I will explain some of the advanced features of Twitter such as utilising services such as Twitterfeed for RSS Feeds, Twitpic for sharing photos via tweets and other services that will enhance your Twitter experience.  I will also be road testing a number of deskop Twitter clients that further enhance your Twitter experience.

Until next time

The term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999. In her article “Fragmented Future,” she writes[5]

“The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave”

Darcy was spot on and today we are surrounded by Web 2.0 and a plethora of Social Networking sites and all that it has to offer.   Social Networking comes in many forms those which many of you reading this article would have come across including Blogs, Facebook, You Tube and others that you may have not come across or are aware of including Twitter, Stumble Upon and the list goes on.   Over the upcoming posts I will focus my attention in a lot more detail explaining each of these tools and how you can benefit from them.

Social Networking can be broken into these category groups in which I have provided examples for each;

Communication:
Blogs such as Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, TypePad, Posterous.
Micro blogging such as Twitter, Plurk
Social Networking such as, Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space, Orkut.

Multimedia:
Photos and Video sharing services such as Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, Photobucket, YouTube, Vimeo, Last.fm.

Social bookmarking:
Sharing Internet favourites through services such as Delicious, Stumble Upon, Reddit, Google Reader.

The below image is what I refer to as the Web 2.0 map… hmm you might say, yes it seems quite overwhelming to the average user, so buckle in your seats and come for the ride, it will be worth the experience!!

So are you ready to embrace social media and social networking?