It has now been one month since I started my “experiment” with social networking and online communities.  The experiment involved trying out Flickr, Ustream, WebShots, and Twitter to see if I could figure out was all this talk about online communities and social networking was all about. 

I had checked out each of these four “communities” to greater or lesser degrees prior to this experiment, but I was never able to grasp the social networking aspects by just “checking them out.”  That’s why I decided to go ahead and sign up for the ones where I didn’t already have a login and try to get better acquainted.  Maybe, by doing that, I would finally be able to figure out what the attraction was.

 The most significant observation after a month of this experiment is that I can rank the level of engagement I have experience with each of these networking serices:

1. Twitter
2. Ustream
3. WebShots
4. Flickr

Twitter has turned out to be enormously engaging.  It’s amazing how many possible uses for it there are, depending on who you “follow.”  (It’s also amazing how quickly one can gain “followers.”)  I decided who to follow by choosing a few people who I already knew were on Twitter and then adding some of the people they followed. 

From doing this I found that there are many professional writers and journalists who use Twitter to promote their other work.  The fun part is that there are a lot of tech writers who use Twitter in conjunction with other new media.  As a result, it’s been almost irrestible to become totally immersed in Twitter and all that flows it.

I started using Ustream more when a live streaming event was announced on Twitter.  There is a chat room with Ustream which usually has many of the same people in the chat room for each event, making it an online community of sorts.

It hasn’t been so easy to experiece the community aspects of WebShots or Flickr.  Perhaps it’s because Twitter and Ustream have kept me so engaged that I haven’t spent much time getting acquainted wth anything else.  It may also be because I haven’t been taking to many photographs lately. 

I would like to be able to spend the next month becoming more acquainted with the online communities and social networks built around WebShots and Flickr.  May is always a good month for taking pictures, so maybe I will be more motivated to spend less free time online and more of it capturing the outdoors with my camera!  Stay tuned!