Just Another Blog…Or Is It?

In order to not waste your time, I’ll tell you upfront that I don’t have any particular academic news to share with you. However, I do want to share my past week’s experience with social networking sites, and my newfound addiction to all things social.

For the MySpace case study, I decided to revisit my MySpace account after 2 years of inactivity. To much of my surprise, the website was cleaned up a lot! I logged in to find tagged photos of me, application requests, and the typical facebook activities that consume my time. My account even had friend suggestions, one of them who is my current roomie! =) I quickly added her, updated my profile, and then discovered MySpace Music!

In the past, MySpace was for keeping up with a few old middle school friends and to check the latest tour dates of my favorite bands. Now, the website has really added to the music side, and I loved the playlist option on my profile page. I added my favorite songs and now have them streaming whenever I visit my profile. I love it! I don’t see myself using MySpace much more than for music purposes and keeping up with the tour dates, but even then the site has me logging in.

My other discovery. LinkedIn. I first got a LinkedIn when I started working at Bazaarvoice this past summer and added a few of my coworkers. Now, I’ve realized that people come and go quickly in your life, and keeping up with those connections is important. It’s easiest to add those friends as they come, and not try to find them later on. In other words, if I wanted to keep in contact with Judd Bagley I should have done so when he was in our class and added him that day. Right now, I’m in the process of finding fellow peers who I will want to stay in touch with beyond our time here at UT.

Twitter. O dear. It seems like my whole life will be broadcasted to the world if you just google my name. I couldn’t resist the temptation to see what Twitter is all about, and just signed up for an account this past week. My excuse is that it is for my MIS375 group project, and that I need to experience the technology before I can really understand and write about it. I can see how “tweeting” can get addictive. Thank goodness I don’t have unlimited text messaging! =)

So that’s it. I’m choosing to put my information and whereabout on the World Wide Web. I’m also choosing to invest so much time in my social networks. Sad, perhaps. Reality, yea.

To get a complete sense of my Internet activity (for all of you marketing folks), the tabs that are normally open on my browser are: Facebook, Yahoo email, Mccombs business email, Blackboard, Youtube (to listen to my fav music video) or Pandora, and perhaps one of my 2 blogs for class purposes, LinkedIn, or MySpace. That’s me in a nutshell. Don’t judge.

For MIS 375, our class has an emerging technology project in which our group has decided to analyze microblogging and see how businesses can use this strategically. While we talked about Twitter, I found out from wikipedia that a new “enterprise microblogging” tool called Yammer was introduced this past September 2008. Yammer creates a microblogging network within a corporation or organization. The basic service is free but the company charges money to any corporations who want to control their own administrative tools. It is called a “Twitter with a business model” allowing Yammer to win the TechCrunch50 Conference this past 2008.  If microblogging begans to really take off (especially when the price of the Iphone goes down), I could see Twitter giving Facebook a little bit of competition, in terms of fast status communication. In this case, Yammer has huge potential to give the professional social networking tool LinkedIn some competition.

Read the article at: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

and the Yammer website: https://www.yammer.com/