The Best of Social Media

With the rise of social media, sharing information about ourselves, each other and the world in general has become an accepted part of life. Here we look at some of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites online.

DIGG.COM

Digg is a place where people can discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by its users. From news to videos to images to Podcasts, Digg works by posting submissions from its users, which other users then ‘Digg' if they like, ‘Bury' if they don't like, ‘Comment' upon or ‘Share' with their friends. The more Diggs your submission gets, the more likely it is to be promoted on the front page for millions of visitors to see. A useful way to find the best information on the net.

For more information about Digg, click here.

OUR PROFILE
To view The Good Web Guide's profile on Digg.com, click here. And watch out for our updates!

FACEBOOK.COM

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while still a student at Harvard University, Facebook is now the most popular social networking website in the world and has an estimated value of $8 billion. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends, send them messages and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves and organize events. Although it might not yet have made it into the Dictionary, much like ‘google', ‘facebook' is now a verb in its own right, with people frequently telling their friends that they've ‘facebooked' them, and social life without it increasingly frustrating for many.

For more information about Facebook, click here.

OUR PROFILE
The Good Web Guide has its own group on Facebook, from which it keeps members up to date with the latest news, reviews and articles. To become a member, search for thegoodwebguide in the ‘Groups' search bar on Facebook.com

MYSPACE.COM

A popular social networking site, MySpace offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally, and is particularly popular amongst individual musicians who wish to give their music a public airing. As the site that launched Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, it has revolutionized the way music is marketed and distributed.

For more information about MySpace, click here.

OUR PROFILE
To view The Good Web Guide's profile on MySpace.com, click here.

BEBO.COM

Popular with a younger community, Bebo.com was founded in January 2005 and stands for ‘Blog early, blog often'. Like many of the other social networking sites, the use may create a Profile, which can be personlised by a design template that is the background of the user's profile, known as skin. Users can then invite friends, add photos, blogs, videos and draw pictures on each others profile pages.

For more information about Bebo, click here.

OUR PROFILE
To view The Good Web Guide's profile on Bebo, click here.

DELICIOUS.COM

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows all types of user from businesses and bloggers to members of the browsing public to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source online. Launched just this year (31st July 08), Delicious places emphasis on the power of the community and greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. It is fast becoming one of the most popular online social ‘sharing' services out there.

For more information about Delicious, click here.

To sign up to Delicious, visit Delicious.com. To tag and save The Good Web Guide as one of your favourites, click here.

TWITTER.COM

A free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. When Jack Dorsey created Twitter in 2006, no-one imagined that it would grow to have such worldwide popularity and relevence. While there are thousands of individuals who 'tweet' whenever they have a sandwich or pop to the shops, the site has most value for businesses who can use it as a way of attracting new clients, keeping existing ones in the loop, and raising brand awareness.

For more information about Twitter, click here.

OUR PROFILE
To keep up with the latest tweets from The Good Web Guide and become a gwg follower, click here.

By Emily Jenkinson