Why Social Media

I learned an important lesson over the last few days about social media. It all started with a bit of curiosity.

On the surface, it would appear that social media is all about connecting with those that you know. I look at my wife's Facebook page and I don't feel like I get it. I mean I understand the pictures and the updates on what everyone is doing and all, but the sea gardens and that stuff - not for me! She uses it mostly for chatting with people she knows and is able to connect with friends and family from all over.

While social media allows you to connect with family and friends, it also allows you to connect with people that you do not know based around a very narrow topic.

Starting with social media is intimidating -- At first it feels really stupid writing twitters about stuff - especially when no one is following you. I was twittering about stuff the kids had said, stuff I was doing, and once I twittered about a thought I had about the javascript framework qooxdoo .

A few hours later, someone from Germany (@fjakobs) was following me. Why was he interested in anything that I had to say? - It turns out that he was a developer working on the qooxdoo framework, and he wanted to be able to communicate with people who are using his framework.

To keep up on anyone that was interested in qooxdoo, he went to twitter search and created a RSS feed for qooxdoo. Not all that many posts, easy to keep up on and he got a list of anyone who wrote anything about qooxdoo. Now I know about @fjajobs and I can follow his progress on the things that are happening with this javascript framework, which is important to me.

This simple exchange helped me to understand social media in a way that I previously had not.

So, I have a simple question, what uses of social media am I still missing? What was your (twitter,tumblr,blog,...) aha moment?