There are two aspects to social web… where your peeps are and features to communicate.
Where your peeps are
Social media has been around for quite a long time. Long before Facebook and people have moved from network to network. You follow your friends to the next big thing and hope that most people will join you. When the first iPhones came out there was a social network called iRovr. At the time, Apple was trying to convince developers to create web based apps that would be used with Safari. They tried for a while until they decided to create the App Store and that’s when Social really changed for the online community.
We had a bunch of new Apps come around for social, like 4Square, Treehouse, and more. The communities were small to begin with and like anything, the cost to maintain the networks became overwhelming and difficult to do. And they have since gone by the waste side.
But then the mega social media websites battled it out, MySpace and Facebook came on the scene, and Facebook won out with a more consistent look and feel.
There were plenty of other online communities out there, whether you think of AOL and chat rooms, some dating apps created themselves as a ad hoc social media app as well. And do you even care where your peeps are? Or do you just want to find new peeps?
Features
Really it’s all about what it can do. What information can you share? How easy is it for you to use? What features do they offer?
- Does it have a Web and App interface?
- Is it offered on both iOS and Android?
- Can you upload photos from your phone?
- Does it have built in GIFs to respond to comments?
- What kind of emojis can you use to respond to posts? Can you just ❤️ a post or have more reactions?
- How do the comments work?
- Can you search the network?
- Is hashtagging a thing?
- Can you tag your friends?
- Are there communities within the app?
- How are the privacy settings?
- How much scrolling can you do?
- What is the situation with videos, creating and remixing?
Given everything we know the new social media offerings of 2023 seem to suggest that change is the only constant we have going on. Some will live and some will die on the vine. Here’s the big media players.
- YouTube
- X (Maybe) Formerly Twitter
- Threads
- Mastodon
- BlueSky
- Snapchat
- TikTok
What do you use? How do you like to engage the social media landscape?