I'm involved with a group called "The Social Media Club". The purpose of the group is to share best practices, establish ethics and standards, and promote media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. I love these kinds of think tanks where all kinds of people who care about social media can come together to discover, connect, share, and learn.
Last night we met in San Francisco - a lot of great discussion around some of the new tools that people are using in Social Media - some I have seen before, others I hadn't. Here are a few of them:
Twitter: If you haven't tried out Twitter, its a service that allows members to inform each other about what they are doing and what they think. It allows users to send messages via phone, instant messaging or the Twitter website. Twitter is a hot service amongst Teens who use it to keep in constant touch with their friends. There was a great example of how BBC News is using Twitter to broadcast their headlines to people who opt in to receive them on their cell phones or IM.
Tiny URL: When I first saw Tiny Url I was trying to think of a practical instance where I would use this service... it essentially allows you to take a really long URL and turn it into a tiny URL. Then I noticed that for example - BBC news is using Tiny URL to reduce the size of their URLs to comply with Twitter's 140 character limitation.
Mooter: Mooter is a really interesting search tool that allows you to receive search results based upon relevance clusters. So for example - a search on San Francisco would bring up results clustered by "Baseball, books, Francisco, Travel Guide, Hotel, Internet, Baseball, etc" If you don't find any of these clusters relevant you can ask Mooter to give you new clusters to consider.
Jyte: If you have something to say, then make a claim and let the community vote on it. Make claims about yourself, friends, and family. Put your stake in the ground and see where the votes go. I can see Jyte being an interesting addition to social networks. Looking at the most voted on claims and the most contested are entertaining.
Some Photos from the Social Media Club:
