A request
I have a request. Take 5 minutes and write a paragraph/list about what your friends should know about you – anything that you believe is recently relevant. Email the paragraph/list your friends right after you write it.
The reason for my request
I have been playing with some of the tools in the “social media” space (blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, podcasts) and paying close attention to how others are using those same tools. I am amazed by how many ‘little’ things I have learned about my friends and a whole set of new connections that I have with them. For example, a good friend of mine wants to write Country songs (something I already knew) and has received all sort of valuable feedback from attending a SongCamp (something detailed in his blog that I didn’t know – certainly not at that depth). He also suffered through a cold recently and bricked his iPhone during a botched firmware upgrade (a tip that helped me avoid the same fate for Jennie’s phone). Maybe I’m a bad friend, but in our phone calls to catch-up we’re generally talking about the big things that are going on and not all the little things, which is a layer of detail that I miss (now that I know it’s there).
The contrast of the what I learned from our phone calls and what I learn from more regular updates via the online tools has me wondering – what else am I missing from friends. I know that not everyone has the interest in writing a blog or posting short updates via Twitter, but I figure that everyone knows how to use email and you never know what’s going on with people in your social network. So take 5 minutes, create your list, forward it to your friends and ask for something similar in return – bet that you will learn some thing.
If you are so inclined to play with Blogs and other tools, give it a shot. Free blogs are available at WordPress.com Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed are all free too. Join up and then link up with your friends. Want to see examples of how others use these tools to communicate? Check out Leo Laporte’s FriendFeed or Veronica Belmont’s. The FriendFeed links are nice since they aggregate many different services into a single location.
Filed under: Social Media
