Update (09/14/08): While most of the information here is factually correct, my use of each social network has changed drastically since December of 2007.

The web is more interesting when you can use it to find long lost acquaintances, share web sites, and interact with your friends and colleagues. The term social gets attached to web sites and networks but its hard for me to think of them as being social. I’m not really interacting with people on social sites, I’m interacting with information about people. But, its pretty clear that these sites have changed the way we use the internet; its not just shopping and email anymore. I like to think of my collection of social networks as one big personal information manager.

So, in order to expose myself further to the online world (and hopefully, get to know others), here are the social networks that I’m apart of and how I use them. I’m not pretending to have just discovered any of these. They’ve been around awhile but I recently came across someone’s blog where they shared their StumbleUpon account and everyone noticed. I listed the applications in order of my preference but, before you go trying all of them, please be aware of each’s reason for existing (for example, please don’t contact me via LinkedIn if you want to see my movie preferences).

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