Social Evolution – Do We Need All Sites?

The four main branches of the internet social world are merging.  Is this evolution and will we really need all the individual sites in 2,3,4 or 5 years time?

It really depends on how YOU use social media and what social media does for YOU.

So let’s recap on what the four main sections of social media are and what they do:

1) Blogging – Blogs have been around for a while now, an online journal where you can either post your inner most secrets or talk a load of rubbish, whatever you do with it, it is your space on the web.

2) Social Media Micro Chat – Sites such as Twitter, Plurk and Kwippy.  Originally started as a quick way of telling people where you were and what you are doing.  It’s not like that anymore

3) Social Bookmarking – Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.  A place where you can share your blog posts with a wider audience and (hopefully) get other readers to say how great you are by telling these social bookmarking sites they like your posts too.

4) Social Networking - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn etc.  A place where you can meet new friends/contatcs and search for old friends.

When these sites all started they all served a specific purpose, but now, if you look closely, there is no difference to any of them really, they are merging and it is the Social sites such as Twitter and Facebook that are taking over.

On Twitter, you can micro blog (a lot of people do this, you get little excerpts of their life in under 140 characters), you can spread the word about your newest blog post and ask people to comment on it, or even retweet it (retweet – repeating a message you have sent so others can see it), you can search for new contacts, look for old friends and make new ones. So Twitter, however simplistic it is, could in theory, wipe out the rest as you can do it all on one site.

Facebook too, does the same.  On Facebook you can have a full blog add-on application, so you can blog to your hearts content with a fully featured blog.  You can also spam people with your latest blog post and even get other people to show your blog feed (rss) on their profile (who needs Digg when you can do that eh?), Facebook also allows you to import your twitter feeds into your profile, or even more snazzy, you could use Facebook to Tweet, by constantly updating your Facebook status message.

So do we need them all? Is it a status symbol of ‘how many online presences can I have’? Is it good to have all of them for self promotion? Or will it end up with one site-does-all?

I think a lot of it depends on what YOU want out of it and HOW you use them?  Personally I like to have a few accounts because, being female, I like to keep up to date with all the latest news and I wouldn’t want to miss anything would I?