“\Small Business Chronicles\” by Jack Brandt

Here is a great article about Social Networking at NewsFactor.com (Click the newsfactor link to go to the article). It covers much more than my article regarding LinkedIn and MySpace.com. Very interesting read if this is your thing…

So it was Christmas night (I know it was almost three weeks ago now), I fired up the PC after all the family had left for the evening, and yes, I checked my email. Like so many of us my IM client executed at startup as well. Before I knew it my buddy was IM’ing me about how much fun he was having on MySpace.com that day. I said to him, “Isn’t MySpace for 14 – 24 year olds, and isn’t social networking just a fad?”

His answer, flat out, “No.” He proceeded to tell me how he put up a profile and was connecting with people, etc… So he piqued my interest. The rest of the evening was dedicated to researching social networking for fun and business. Fun Christmas evening, right… My research got me thinking. Personal social networking is imitating what I used to do as a teenager in person. Back in the day when I was a teenager, I used to belong to the local YMCA’s gym, played sports, and hung out with friends cruising the strip in whatever towns we were in looking for people to meet and hang out with. It seems to me that personal social networking is augmenting a lot of those activities that I used to partake in.

Today I can look at a personal social networking profile with picture and decide whether I want to make an attempt to meet that person or not based on their likes, dislikes, or even looks.

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