Social Networking - Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, etc.

I just went through the process of changing my blog, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages/profiles to all link to each other (and an added bonus, my Facebook profile also links to my Flickr page.  I've noticed a few things, and I've dropped my thoughts here.The ones that I use that are not linked together are MySpace and Del.icio.us.

It seems to me that there are three categories of all these sites: full network, specialized network, and link sharing.

The full network sites include Facebook and MySpace.  I have accounts on both, and they are quite different.  Most of the same stuff is posted on them.  However, half my friends are younger than I am, and MySpace in general has the high school and college party atmosphere (even on the friends that are older than I am).  On Facebook, the pages are more mature-feeling, but I have fewer friends, and those that I do are my age.  However, there are less posts about getting drunk and more about drinking wine (I know few wine drinkers that drink wine to get drunk; most people that I know that get drunk use shots or beer).  Then there's LinkedIn, which is geared towards business.  I have the most friends on that, and have spent the most time on it.  Some of those friends are personal, but most are people that I've met at a variety of different locations.  All of those personal friends are coworkers or former coworkers.

The specialized network sites include Flickr and likely YouTube (I don't have a YouTube page, but from what I've seen, it falls in this category).  They can be used as a full-blown networking site, but lack the numbers to really be able to do that (MySpace has around 250,000,000, where Flickr has around 3,000,000).  The profiles on the full network sites are larger, whereas the Flickr and other specialized sites have smaller profile pages.  The benefit with Flickr (and likely all of the specialized sites) is how well it is geared towards its subject matter.  On Flickr, I can view how a photo was taken - focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, camera make/model, etc.  For an amateur photographer, I like being able to see this type of data (see this page for what I am referring to - you can see what camera settings I used to create this image).

The link sharing sites, like Del.icio.us are geared towards sharing links only.  I have one, but don't use it very often to post.  I do look at what is popular, though, since there have been many occasions where I have found some really cool stuff.  However, it isn't a place I spend a lot of time.