What's the Point?

Earlier this week my mother asked me this question, "What's the point of all this social networking stuff?" (I know I did similar blog a few weeks ago but trust me...this is different.) I have a FaceBook page, I'm on LinkedIn, I Tweet and I write this blog. It's a world that a lot of people in my parents generation just don't "get." For me, each serves its own purpose: FaceBook is for casual, personal use, LinkedIn is more for work or business related relationships, Twitter and the blog are mostly just for fun and tie into my FaceBook page. From talking to other folks, I'm not that unusual in how I use these different social tools.

Since I've been using these various resources I have been able to reconnect in a variety of ways with friends I had in high school, college and with previous employers. No deep, long lost relationships have been reestablished but it is nice to find out what old friends are up to these days and learn something about the journey they took that brought them to where they are now. These people influenced my life at some point in time. It doesn't need to have been some huge, earth shattering, deep rooted, significant impact but none of us can help but be affected in some way by the relationships we have had over the years.

One of the more amazing outcomes of all this social networking is the realization that I literally have friends all over the world. It's no surprise that I have friends spread throughout the US...that's the nature of our society and Colorado Springs is a pretty transitory city. What is truly awesome is taking a look at the various countries where some of my friends live: United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, Colombia, Austria, Uganda, India, Honduras, El Salvador, Indonesia, Australia, Switzerland, France... Then I think about some of the friends I have made that aren't using these social networking tools - or at least we haven't connected through them yet. These friends live in places like Italy, New Zealand, Kenya, Rwanda, Ecuador, Germany, South Korea, the Dominican Republic... WOW!

As I was graduating from high school and college and having a go at making film and video production a career, I never dreamed I would travel to so many places and meet so many people. These fancy new internet based social sites have allowed me to continue to keep in touch with so many more people than I ever would have without them. Sure, it may be just a short comment on someone's wall or a quick tweet but to me it serves as a reminder that says "Hey – I remember you! I haven't forgotten you and the time we spent together. You still mean something to me and I appreciate our friendship."

That's the point.

A Blog about Tweeting a LinkedIn Post for FaceBook

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Keely while we were in the Dominican Republic last week. I told her that I'm already on Facebook, LinkedIn and am writing this blog so what additional advantage would I gain by adding Twitter to what has already become a time consuming list of social networking? She talked about the advantage of being able to get micro bursts of information from not just my friends but organizations that I'm interested in. We went back and forth for a few minutes and pretty much left without resolving much of anything.

Over the past week I've kept thinking about our conversation - playing it over and over again in my brain and actually debating with myself over the whole issue. So today I took the plunge. I signed up with the handle "colorado_ric" so if you tweet feel free to follow me.

Ironically, my best friend signed up to check out the Twitter movement at almost the same time that I did and we hadn't even talked about it. If you just can't help yourself you can follow him, too!

While I'm at it I'll toss out that I'm working on an idea for a small business/hobby type of idea. Guess what? It's a social networking thing, too! As some of you know my wife and I own a Mazda Miata that we not only enjoy driving but have been having a good time fixing up, too. I am pretty sure that there are quite a few other people that enjoy the same things we like doing with the Miata so I'm working on a fansite that I hope to launch in the not-too-distant future. The biggest question becomes, "Where am I going to find the time to do all this stuff?!?"