time, other people may follow your tweets, too. If you'd rather not broadcast your posts to the universe, select the 'Protect my Updates' option in Twitter's settings to keep your posts out of the public timeline and approve any followers before they can see your tweets. You can even have Twitter "nudge" you with an e-mail reminder should you forget to post for a while. When you're away from your computer, Twitter permits you to send and receive tweets on your cell phone via SMS or Twitter's mobile Web site. I recently used the latter to keep tabs on Steve Jobs's January Macworld Expo keynote via the twittering of several Mac pundits in the audience.
Special-Purpose Sites
The problem with the big mass-market social networks is that, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, nobody uses them any more--they're too crowded. How will anyone find your profile among the 400 million MySpace pages? Now, however, thousands of social networking sites have emerged that are built around specific activities, ideas, or interests, or that target particular groups of people, such as Baby Boomers.
Some examples: With help from the no-frills iMedix, you can find information on the Web related to specific conditions or illnesses, and chat with or e-mail other people who have the same concerns. At BlackPlanet.com, African-Americans can connect around various topics or geographic locations; MiGente is a sibling site with similar features intended for the Latino community, and AsianAve.com serves Asian communities. And people who are approaching or already experiencing their golden years can make virtual connections at TeeBeeDee, a site dedicated to social networkers ages 40 and up.
Ning
Roll your own social network on Ning.com, or find and join one of the thousands of topical groups already created by other users.
If you can't find an online community that matches your needs, you can build your own. At Ning, you create a customized social network with its own domain name and banner art, individual member profile pages, photo and video sharing, multiple subtopic groups, and discussion forums. Once your custom network is complete, anyone--not just Ning members--can find it in Ning's directory or through the site's keyword tag cluster. Creating a Ning network takes only a couple of minutes: You come up with a name and a domain name (at the end of which the site will add '.ning.com'), enter a description of the network, put in some keyword tags, and insert an icon image, and you're off. To increase the safety and privacy of your network's users, you can make it visible only to members, and you can opt to approve each would-be member or make membership by invitation only.
Taste-Based Sites
LibraryThing
Despite Steve Jobs's recent assertion that nobody reads anymore, a growing number of sites focus on something almost everyone can relate to: what's on your bedside table. LibraryThing lets you catalog the contents of your library, share your reading preferences with other users, and discover books and authors that you might otherwise have ignored. Are you a fan of Spanish author Ramón Del Valle-Inclán? A surprising number of LibraryThing subscribers share your eclectic taste, and are ready for a discussion. At the moment, LibraryThing has about 330,000 subscribers.
You start by adding books to your online catalog one at a time, either by typing in the book's ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or by copying its information from another member's catalog. Alternatively you can find and import multiple books into your catalog by searching for ISBNs on publisher, bookseller, or book review Web pages.
Once you've established your library, LibraryThing can suggest other books for you to read based on the catalogs of members who have similar tastes. Tag-cloud pages for authors and topical keywords permit you to see at a glance what other people are reading. Members with free accounts can catalog up to 200 of their favorite books; unlimited accounts require a US$10 annual donation, and a lifetime membership to the site costs $25.
Last.fm
Tired
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