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by Scott Frangos, Managing Editor - WebHelperMagazine.com

There is much energy, start-up capital, and media attention being paid to Social Networking and the companies that facilitate it, these days. Why? In a nutshell, I think it is about empowering people to communicate — on new levels. In a recent post, I wrote about the “5 C’s of Social Marketing” (beyond simply “networking”, many in business are interested in “marketing” in new ways) — Content, Community, Conversation, Connection, Convergence. A bit abstract… so how do these ideas play out in the real world, and how can you take advantage of some new technologies associated with social networking? Let’s take a look.

coCOMMENT - The Conversation is Joined…

coComment collects all of your conversations you have in comment sections on blogs in one place for you. You can place all of your comments onto your own blog with a snippet of code they provide. And, you can browse the coComment community to see what other social networkers are talking about. Think of it as a way to join a sort of MetaConversation — a way to thread together yours (and others) comment postings from disparate locations and view them from beyond.

Above is a listing of all the sites, by posts, on which I have left comments. You can expand any listing to read all comments, including those posted after your own.

I checked the “Top Commenters” board for this post, and learned that one dude has 5,452 comments logged through the system. Wow… now if you could monetize that. Wait… he is creating content on sites that are already monetized — for their owners, including coComment. Let’s hope that guy either types over 100 words per minute, is independently wealthy, or knows of some way to monetize all that commentary (maybe an ebook on his comments?).

Note also that coComment has more going on there than just Co-Comments. You can sync up with Technorati (a blog search and publicity service) and “claim your blog,” if you have one on coComment, join groups, make friends, and research other commenters.

CONVERGENCE: A hop over to the coComment blog and I learned that the coComment has made a new FaceBook App that grabs and displays your comments at FaceBook. So… now my comments are:

1. on individual blogs,
2. at coComment, and
3. listed at FaceBook.

Great. Automatic content for all of those places, and links that:

1. show people what I’m about,
2. lead back to some of my websites,
3. help with business networking.

Convergence.

Convergence is one of the “Five ‘C’s” of Social Networking that I spoke about. Here we’re less concerned with the philosophy of Social Networking, and more with companies that are actively engaged in it and how that can benefit you. But it is interesting that while some of the benefits of MetaSocial services are obvious (saving time, etc.), the full relevance is not yet understood.

We believe that the annoyance and complexity of managing multiple email and social networking accounts takes too much time and is having an adverse affect on people’s digital lifestyles – causing undue stress and annoyance.

Matt Colebourne, CEO and founder of coComment, “conversed” on just this factor in responding to my own comment (and yours? you can join the conversation too at the coComment blog), where he said, in part, “What happens is that individuals and individual conversations become connected and that, of course, changes the nature of those conversations. For example, people may well realise that the same topics and themes are emerging in many different places and that those themes, therefore, are clearly important. This then changes the nature of those conversations.” So… we can see part of what is happening as these web 2.0/3.0 MetaSocial sites providing an engine for emerging themes. You can read full interview with Mr. Colebourne, and get his views on future trends.

Above, is my FaceBook page with Apps installed to post my coComment comment trail at left (in blue), and also the RSS feed for my OpenSourceWebMaster.com blog (under “My Feeds). I have also converged in my “LinkedIn” (an excellent business networking site) profile. So now, I have a convergence at FaceBook too — and this is just the tip of the iceberg. FaceBook offers a list of 435 “business” applications, plus 715 “education” applications and thousands in other categories that you can add to your “page”, or was that “social application”, or was that “convergence terminal.” Hmmmmm. After I took this screenshot, I also added a Skype Status button. More convergence… more fusion…

FUSER (beta) - One from Many…

Do you have more than one email account on different services? Do you Yahoo, and Google too? Wouldn’t it be nice to have only one account? Enter Fuser: “unified mail, all in one account.” Of course, this is a bit like forwarding your mail to one main account, so at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much new here. But they’ve taken the idea one step forward… you can contact friends at Facebook and MySpace, also through Fuser - https://www.fuser.com.

Above is my fuser homepage showing that I have fused together three email accounts, my facebook account, on which a couple of friends pop up on the “Leaderboard,” and also that I have 567 unread mail (mostly subscriptions to group digests) in one of my accounts. 567? Wait a minute — I thought this was going to save me time? Guess what I could REALLY USE, is a speed reading class.

Well, after all of this flurry of Social Media Networking, I was really relieved to learn that the philosophy behind Fuser is,

Whew. The stress is apparent. But one of the costs of information access is information overload.

Brainstorms & Questions:

• With so many Social Media convergence options what makes the best sense to combine and turn-on? For example, I could turn on a list of my business contacts from Linked-In on Facebook. Why? Does this help FaceBook more than me?
• Does all of this really save time, or just focus you better on an abundance of information? Can you guess my answer?
• How will becoming aware of emerging themes in conversation benefit the blogosphere and society in general? My thoughts are that this will speed things up, bring focus, and draw attention quickly to trends.
• If you recognize that a lot of your “work” in this web of collaboration actually creates content, and so value at the sites which allow it, then how can you get back some value for yourself?
• Your FaceBook page is a website — begin with the end in mind. This means that particularly for business users, but even if it is a hobby, you should start with a clear mission in mind and build your presence there accordingly (you can drag different content boxes around your FaceBook page to make navigation easier, for example).
• What is your “Meta-Communications” plan? So you turn on your Fusion email aggregation box, and register at coComment, complete “answers” at LinkedIn, and gather all of that Social media into your FaceBook account. Now what? Or, should I say, “so what”? Nothing happens until you start driving this techno-media meta-engine of conversation. Nothing. So… what is your purpose in all of this? Are you a student? Are you a consultant?ConclusionMaybe “conclusion” isn’t the right word in this quickening time of Social Media evolution. I think it’s more along the lines of “on with the emergence.”

You know, with the web moving toward community and conversation — the core of civilization and of humanity throughout history, though now global and technologically modified — I am reminded of an old quote from T.S. Elliott: The way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back… and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started — and know that place for the first time.” See you there.