Brian McCullough

I can still recall the first time I had ever heard of Facebook. I was on a college break in Palm Springs hanging out with a friend from University of San Diego. We where talking about MySpace and she said “…but are you on Facebook?” I was like uh. She went ahead and gave me the tour, I went to sign up and unfortunately my school was not open for registration, many were not. So I put my name and school in the Facebook database and months later was invited.

Back then Facebook was a social network grouping people and schools within a clean interface (unlike MySpace’s GUI) with a ever growing list of new helpful settings, functions, and applications. Unlike it’s competitor, Myspace, Facebook had very little downtime, much less spam and always seemed to have its users in mind. These things and more have set Facebook up to become the multi billion dollar website or as Mark Zuckerberg calls it “Social utility” that it is today.

Today there are tons of social network communities to choose from, trust me I know, I joined about 15 of them over the weekend. I was very impressed that every site had their differences, this made my social network excursion interesting. The biggest downfall, for me, was that once I was signed up I did not know how to start “socially networking”. Many sites wanted me to start by uploading all my email addresses into their database. I do realize that uploading contacts is important for growth, however; only bother me with it once or twice, and not till I do it, after a while this became annoying.

A few of the sites listed their steps of interaction for me, overall they where:

1 Add friends, mainly by uploading your contacts
2. Update you profile information
3. Interact

More Like!

1. Upload Free Leads
2. Fill In Free Targeted Information
3. Help Grow Content to Attract Advertisers

For me I would say that two factors determined which sites where my favorite; first was the look and feel and second was the usefulness. I put a * next to all of networks that satisfied my initial experience.

Sites that I have joined in the past or over the weekend - *favs

Lets see how many I use…