There is a great 3 series post on TechCrunch on Social Networking: The Past, Present and Future. It’s a very good read, I highly recommend it.

If you ask a teenager today what is social networking, we all know the answer will be Facebook. But, I don’t think social neworking started with AOL or even with online community called “The Well” (founded in 1985). I think social networking has been here since the very beginning, since the start of civilization, obviously in a much much different form. Toward the end of last century we had the wireless (mobile) phone, before that it was a regular phone and before that it was the telegraph. These are all tools for social networking. Television and radio can also be considered social networking tools. All these tools made it possible to share information. Fast rewind to beginning and we get social tools such as fires, beacons, smoke signals, pigeons, human messengers and mirrors. I think all these were tools for social networking in one way or another.

Many web sites now specially formatted when accessed from mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android and others, I had to join the party. I installed a nice WordPress WPtouch plug-in (free version is available) that formats a site to be viewed on a mobile device. When you access http://mkblog.exadel.com from your mobile device, the site should look like this:

Enjoy.

I was thinking about this for the past few months, how do I use or how should I use all the social “stuff” out there? As I thought about it, this is the picture that surfaced. It works for me, maybe it will work for you, maybe not. Maybe I’ll change some things in the future. I use the three main social sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Facebook
Facebook is purely personal, I will not accept any professional invites. I only connect with family and friends. Sorry, I just don’t think someone who I met at a conference needs to see my family pictures.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is of course a professional networking site. I will gladly accept invites to connect with people I met at conferences, trade shows, trainings and probably anyone else. Usually if I get a business card and I will look up that person on LinkedIn and send him or her an invite. I think it’s much better way to keep in touch than saving the business somewhere. I always connect to recruiters that are posting job ads, you just never know how they can help you in the future.

Twitter
My Twitter feed is open so anyone can follow me, professional contacts as well as friends. Probably 80% of what I post is work related and the other 20% are articles that I read and some other interesting stuff.

My blog
I also run a blog. If you are reading this than you probably know about it already. My blog is mostly work related. Occasionally I’ll post something on my travel or any other interesting stuff.

Posting
As you probably know, you can connect your LinkedIn account with your Twitter account. Once you do that, if you add #in or #li to any tweet, that tweet will also appear in your LinkedIn feed (it’s also possible for LinkedIn to read all your tweets, without using #in or #li). I usually forget to add #in. I started using a service called ping.fm which allows to post to multiple sites.

There are also micro-blogging sites such as Posterous and Tumblr. I still haven’t figured how to use them for either work or personal.

You can now become a fan of Exadel on Facebook. Why would you become a fan of Exadel (I know.. we are not as fun as some other “celebrities” out there). Well, there is so much information out there today, it could be difficult to stay up to date. Facebook and Exadel’s Twitter is a great way to keep up with what’s happening with RichFaces, Flamingo, JavaFX plug-in for Eclipse and various events and conferences we attend.