Advice: MyTwitBook – a parent’s guide to social media – Part Two

Part Two

Last month, I outlined what social media is, and began to give you, the parent, a quick primer on some of the big players. We covered SMSs, MySpace and the wonderful world of Blogging, but we saved the best till last…

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Facebook

facebook.com overtook myspace in terms of millions of users in 2008, and hasn’t looked back. Beginning life as an online yearbook for university students, it quickly grew due to it’s more refined interface and (counterintuitively) it’s lack of graphical customisation. Instead, Facebook uses plugins called Applications, that allow the user to add unique games/quizes/audio/video/etc etc etc – there are tens of thousands of Facebook applications – a stratch for every unique itch.

Facebook is popular with a wider audience, generally teenagers through to baby-boomers. It’s not unknown for younger people to ‘sign up’ their parents without their express knowledge, only to find that thier parents enjoy the experience just as much as the children.

In my experience, I found Facebook early on, and didn’t see much in it – simply because there weren’t many people using it at the time – perhaps only a million or so worldwide. But in recent years, I’ve been ‘friended’ by old school mates who have all been on it more recently, and I’ve been more thanb pleasantly surprised by the uptake of it by non-geeks – it’s the first big league sucess cross-over from a technical crowd to a mainstream crowd.

In the last few weeks, Facebook has been going down the path of Twitter, with more emphasis on making and keeping track of the ‘status updates’ of your friends. This is exactly analogous to Twitter’s ‘tweets’, below.

Facebook has an impressive array of features and plugins, and everything you do can (and will, unless turned off!) be broadcast to your friends as a ‘life stream’.

Privacy rules require authorisation before full contact can be made with new people, but like all online web sites, it’s only as secure as a poassword. There have been many reports of user’s profiles being overtaken by third parties – usually due to password guessing or trojan horse applications asking for personal details. In these cases, Facebook’s ‘real-life’ staff are hard to get a hold of, with little or no chance of finding the offenders.

Twitter

Twitter is the latest entry in the world of social media, and it’s derived from the simple concept of ‘tell the world what you’re doing’. You only have 140 characters per ‘tweet’, which is a short message broadcast to all your ‘followers’. As a Twitter user, you can follow anyone else, thereby watching (reading) their stream of tweets.

The proverbial tweet is the one describing what you had for breakfast that morning, but once you get past that, Twitter is a great resource for either chatting with people in SMS-like increments, or for following what other inspirational or otheriwse interesting people have to say.

It’s also turned into a fantastic resource for tapping the collective wisdom of the ‘twittorati’, and for watching the *reaction* to events happening in the real world. If Google gives good search results from a day or two ago, Twitter gives a good ‘feel’ of the vibe of events happening – as they happen.

Twitter is currently attracting the 20′s to 40′s, and then, still a very internet-centric audience. It hasn’t turned into the mainstream like Facebook, but current growth rates suggest it will head that way.

MMORPGs

Into Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? Join the 11 million online *right now* playing ‘Warcraft’, or the many millions more playing any of 100 other MMORPGs.

It might not be your cup of tea, but if it *is*, then it’s a highly addictive world of solo game playing, combined with community-based and faction-based strategy. Add to that some immersive worlds and a never-ending competition to be the best, and you’ve got yet one more way to spend hours a week interacting with the world, without ever leaving your chair.

Combining the best of the above two Social Media is the Farmville phenomenon: a free game within Facebook that lets you compete against friends and against the world to see who can build the biggest/bestest farm. It’s actually a lot like the MMORPGs, above, in that it’s incredibly easy to begin playing, but you get hooked very quickly – as there’s always a ‘reward’ if you play for that *little bit* longer…

The mobile/iPhone revlution

Everything is going mobile. With the surge in mobile phone ownership almost equalling current populations (and beating it in some countries!), the trend is clearly to be on the Internet where ever you are. Facebook and Twitter all have mobile-phone specific versions, and MySpace and blogs are easily accessed by the iPhone’s internet browser – the first to be (almost) as decent as a regular computer’s internet browser (save for the fact that it’s on a screen barely 4″ across).

For the first time, data over mobile phones is becoming cheap enough to use without worry about huge phone bills. To send this article via Twitter or via mobile phone data plan might cost only 1 or 2 cents, given an 8k file size. Compared to the $16 plus for an SMS, that’s hardly worth contemplating.

So – the internet, Google, and the world of social media is with us and our children, anywhere we go… so…

What should I do now? How should I react ot my kids using Social Media?

My suggestion: either ignore it or embrace it. It’s easy to ignore it, and write it off as *the fad* of the current generation. There’s an element of truth to that: many of these social networks won’t exist in two years, let alone 5 or 10. If you pick the ‘wrong’ social network it may die off over time, but it’s easy enough to spot the trend, and find another, more vibrant one to replace it.

But there’s also an underlying change in the way this new generation has grown up compared to our earlier generations: these technologies *are* the skills of this generation. This new generation does not *need* to know how to break down an engine block and put it back together – it does not *need* to know how to sew any more… the mastery of computer games, the knowledge of electronic devices, and the ability to adapt to new user interfaces are all highly sought after ‘skills’ of a new workforce.

Just this year, the US Army advertised for more jobs as pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles than for pilots of jet fighters. The skills required are in computer systems, computer control, problem solving, and the ability to totally master an Xbox and/or Playstation.

It’s a brave new world.

I hope this has started some interest in learning the ropes – if prompted, I’ll flesh out more of the social media scene for you over the coming weeks and months.

AB out