This post relates to Joshua Allen’s piece: How Do You Get the Latest News? somewhat, but I’m going to examine Social Media from a slightly different perspective. I’ve begun work on an application for one of the upcoming MIX online projects. Since I’ve been working on it, and being a n00b to social media, I’ve been contemplating which social media services provide the most useful insight into what is going through the consciousness of the web. I’m going to list off, what I perceive, are some of the more common and useful social media services; certainly not a comprehensive list, but if you feel I’ve made a glaring omission, please speak up!

FriendFeed has done a nice job of listing some of the more popular social media services and now is able to track 57 distinct services for it’s members. It aggregates that information into a single unified feed and is conveniently published via  a REST API. If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed you can check out the Social Timeline infographic to see what I’m talking about; type in "scobleizer" if you don’t have any FriendFeed friends yet. I find FriendFeed useful to sift through large amounts of information about particular subject and it is useful since it creates relationships between it’s users and their social media outlets, as well as users friends. FriendFeed requires its users to proactively sign up, and cannot search content of users that haven’t signed up for the service. If only we could get everyone to sign up…

It looks as though to really find out what’s going on in the world, FriendFeed alone cannot solve it, and this means that we need to listen on multiple channels. One way to listen globally is using Google Alerts. It sends emails when an item of relevance is found; i.e. anytime it finds a new hit with your name or a search phrase,it sends mail,but this is only so useful, since this cannot be managed or aggregated today.

I see social media applications and services having at least two fundamental criteria to be considered useful. 1. That it have a sufficiently large enough user base and 2. that the service exposes its data via an API of some kind. Regardless of service, if it has a small user base, it can be considered a skewed or non-centered crowd. Also, if it does not expose an API to access it, it really diminishes it’s value since the service becomes a silo or island of information and is not useful to third party developers trying to fit all the pieces together into a coherent picture.

Another important dimension in the social media spectrum is information size; Twitter is obviously on the small end of it. Twitter falls into the class of a "status" service, and as we all know Twitter is great way to find out what is happening in the world right now. Since Twitter has such a huge following, boasting 14m memberships, it is rife with information, and there are many client’s that make it easy to search or follow users tweets. Some tweets remain valid forever, but generally speaking they tend to get stale fairly quick. Incidentally Karsten and Tim have just put together the Archivist, which is a Twitter archiving and activity analysis tool that is very useful for those that need historic Twitter data.

FaceBook Connect, also a status service, is also on this same end of the info-size spectrum. Next there are the "bookmarking" services also at the small end of size spectrum; Delicious being one of these has a large user base and an API. Stumbleupon, seems to differentiate BY well, users, though, we, brought, they, Joshua, BottleTalkby showing bookmarks of people with similar interests, but does not appear to have an API at this time. rendering it less useful. Both Delicious and Digg employ the "wisdom of crowds" to differentiate themselves, as brought to my attention by Derek Powazek at An Event Apart, by floating interesting and relevant information to the top of their lists. Digg a very popular "news" service also has an API. The nice thing about the “wisdom of crowds” is that it can gauge how important people think things are as they become more popular. Once again the number of people that contribute to services is very important and make for higher quality information.

Blogs are a wonderful resource of small to medium sized information that have a mid to longer-term life expectancy, but as Joshua hints, watching blog feeds is a time-consuming process, since you need to grok all the content before you can decide its relevance. Search engines can find the relevance, again using the "wisdom of the crowds" approach to cull less useful information.

Then there are the "photo” sharing media sites that contain medium to large amounts of information. Flickr and Photobucket both are popular and have API’s to access, and at the huge end of the information size spectrum is the "video" media with: YouTube and Vimeo. Both expose API’s, and both are ways to get out a large amounts of information, to large audiences quickly, in a sometimes viral way.

In typical fashion, I like to ask: What’s next? What’s next in the world of Social Media? What wonders are on the horizon? What new way will we be able to examine information that gives us insight into the present, and possibly brief glimpses into the future. Is the next step aggregation of social media on a large scale, with searching techniques to help us find what we need to learn, or will we see the pendulum swinging the other direction to more verticals such as BottleTalk or LinkedIn social networking sites that center around a particular topic or meme.

What are other dimensions of social media that matter to you? Write a comment and tell us what you think. Stay in touch with us through Twitter.

I’ve linked all the services mentioned above, down here, to minimize clutter: FriendFeed, Google Alerts, Twitter, FaceBook, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, Vimeo, BottleTalk, LinkedIn