Most people will be familiar with facebook (check out our page!) and how that works as a social device, i.e. you add your network, they add you and then you share your posts, pictures, movies, updates and etc. with you network getting general updates on their 'news feed' (whenever you do something) and specific updates in their notifications (whenever you do something that mentions/involves them). What this requires is the voluntary connection (your network) in the facebook ecosystem.
Twitter (please check us out here as well!) on the other hand allows you to 'follow' and be 'followed' in an effort to create and engage your network - think of twitter networking just like a cocktail party, everyone is there, and you can eavesdrop on public conversations, or you can engage and have conversation with people you want to network with. In twitter, like facebook, you can still post links and pictures etc. but twitter is much less of a 'restricted' social platform or self-selecting social network than facebook. The contrast can be boiled down to the difference between a social club and a community centre - facebook is built more exclusive, you need to be a member and people need to let you in their club.
What's beautiful about twitter (similar to the facebook news feed) is that in this ecosystem, not only are publicly posted tweets there for you to browse (following or not), but many tweeps add a "hashtag" to their posts so that other tweeps can follow a topic or trend.
All of the latest information (including links to images, video, articles and etc.) that tweeps post can be aggregated and searched by these hashtags and trends nicely for review - without having to dig into twitter, searching and following. For us here at SE101, this means we can follow the hashtag #SocEnt (Social Entrepreneurship) for example and see everyone posting with the hashtag (we also really like #NonProfit and #WEP - World Economic Forum).
Through the magic of Web 2.0 (if you really want to know how it works watch this video), innovative coding allows us to take these hashtags and trends to an all new level and a daily 'newspaper' can be created to give us the previous days most notable tweets. Paper.li has launched a service that allows you to create your own special interest newspaper, or, like us, allows you to follow topics and trends that are important to you in a nice, easy to read package instead of a mess of linear, historically listed 140 character posts.
Here are a couple papers we like:
- #SocEnt http://paper.li/tag/socent
- #WEF http://paper.li/davos
- #NonProfit http://paper.li/tag/nonprofit
While these newspapers are informative (and they are!) they still do not replace live participation in the ecosystems that are the Social Media Cocktail Party. Please, check us out on Facebook and Twitter - like us, follow us, share our posts, retweet our tweets - with your help, we can continue to grow our community and provide our course to Kenyan Youth!
