My friend Keaven recently posted about his growing experiences with what he terms “the micro-blog craze,” specifically his success with Ping.fm which allows a user to update multiple social networks with one message. This prompted me to relate my usage of social networks in general.

I have been using Twitter regularly now for more than two months, and I love it. Despite its frequent outages as it grows in popularity (remember that even Digg had “scaling issues” early on), Twitter is an amazingly unnecessary and yet completely addictive form of communication that when I’m not at my computer I think about all those “tweets” (Twitter messages) that I’m not seeing. But let’s take a step back and explain what Twitter is to those of you who might not know. Twitter bills itself as “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Essentially it is a mini- (or micro- or nano-) blogging tool which allows you to post a short message (under 140 characters) via web or text message and allows your “followers” to choose how they receive your messages, again via web or text message. Twitter also has a powerful API which has spawned a whole host of third-party applications.

OK, now back to me: I use Twitter to participate in that “great conversation” that it allows by following various people (mostly internet celebs and other denizens of forums I frequent) and using @replies to designate a reply to someone. For this reason, my usage of Twitter tends to be more ‘real time’ so my issue was less how to keep everything updated (à la Keaven) and more how to manage the tweets that are coming in. My solution so far is twhirl, a desktop application (for Windows and Mac OSX) which provides frequent tweet notification (clearly distinguishing regular tweets from direct messages and @replies), cross-posts to Pownce and Jaiku, and performs various other Twitter-friendly things like shortening URLs and searching Tweet Scan. It’s the best Twitter client that I’ve found that does what I need.

So far this lengthy (and getting lengthier) post mostly has been about Twitter since that’s the network I use most frequently, but I did want to touch on a few others:

• I use Facebook quite a bit to post interesting links or videos I find and to interact with a smaller circle of people I know via the varied applications Facebook allows. (While I have a MySpace page that is fairly up to date, I almost never visit the site.)
• I mentioned Pownce earlier, but mostly I just receive other people’s posts (links, pictures, events) and usually only post there through twhirl unless it’s a reply. Among the advantages that Pownce has over Twitter, though, are that there is no character limit, you can post pictures and files, and they have threaded replies.
• I suppose del.icio.us can be considered a social network in that you can save links and share them with others, including the ability to mark a link as “for:” someone. I use del.icio.us mostly via their excellent Firefox extension which takes the place of Firefox’s Bookmarks and allows me to access my bookmarks wherever I am. (I also use it to submit story suggestions to Buzz Out Loud, my favorite audio podcast.)
• Similarly, StumbleUpon could be considered a link-based social network, although in a more aggregated sense in that when you “Stumble” you are shown pages thumbed-up by others with similar likes as you. I usually just use the toolbar to send Keaven links, though.
• I am also on LinkedIn, a network used to connect people professionally. For me, it’s just basically an online résumé.
• Getting back to Keaven’s post, he mentions seeing me as a fan of Brightkite on Facebook. Brightkite is a location-based social network where you can check-in to wherever you are and get notified when other users are in the area or see who has visited in the past. I was fortunate enough to get in the private beta early enough that my user name is actually “roy”. Awesome. Anyway, I haven’t used it too much, but it is an interesting concept that I hope catches on once it gets out of beta. (I have invites so let me know if you want one).

I think I have covered all the networks that I use, but if you think I’m missing one or you know of one that I just have to join, let me know!