Television and newspaper reports make ‘Social Media‘ and ‘Social Networking‘ buzz words sound like something that’s arrived on the scene in the past couple of years – but at least the basics pre-date the existence of the internet itself. Early BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) existed before anyone had even heard the term ‘internet’, and in concept will probably exist when its moved on from its current form.

My first experiences of the Internet involved struggling to make an Acorn RISC PC (post-Archimedes era RISCOS system) connect to Demon Internet – something I very shortly lost interest with and then attempted again a year or two later using Compuserve as an ISP. At the time this involved a sign-up fee, monthly subscription costs and national rate BT call charges. Compuserve had a built in message board structure as well as IRC (Internet Relay Chat), then later First Class (combining the two, plus rich media) which was adopted by the Open University quite early on – something I got involved in quite heavily as a means of exploring the diverse social aspect of the net. But all of this was heavily limited by both the inherent costs of being online for any significant period of time and the critically slow connection speed of a 56.6kbps modem.

If you’ve been using the internet since as early as 1996 (or even earlier) then your experiences of connecting to other users for social reasons may be very similar, and like me, you’re probably keen to embrace new forms of social networking, especially if they can offer something new.

Instant messenger clients like MSN, AIM and ICQ proceeded Internet Relay Chat use and existed way before any of the current social networking sites came into play. They’re still very popular, although the media still seem to be stuck in the mindset that IM’s are still ‘chat rooms‘ and lead to children being duped into strangers’ cars.

MySpace seemed to be the first Social Networking site to get mainstream news coverage and therefore mass popularisation, but its novelty seemed to be centred around having the highest friend count out there. It suffered from grotesquely heavy amounts of spam, and now seems to be almost entirely left for dead by its user base. Has anyone asked you “are you on MySpace?” in the last year and a half? Despite its flaws however, MySpace does seem to still be the default option for Bands on a self-promotion tip. To an extent it’s probably still one of the best options as the site is still very well trusted, and it’s big advantage is how heavily it can be customised – ideal for bands and labels who want their artwork to be fully integrated online. Somehow it does seem ironic though that the default MySpace music player re-encodes mp3′s to a noticeably poor bitrate. I’d say MySpace’s days are probably numbered and without re-inventing themselves or taking better advantage of their music profiling niche, then at some point in the next 5 years it may well find itself at the online graveyard with Geocities.

Facebook is quite clearly where all the former MySpace users ended up, plus some. With a clean interface, relatively good spam controls, and a much more rigid structure – it’s ideal for the kind of talk that most internet users want to engage in. Unlike MySpace though it’s much more focused on limiting your online friends to people you actually know, or have known in the past. No more mass friend adding! This exclusive culture has probably been directly influenced by Facebook’s history as a resource intended for / strictly limited to University students. But in the long term it will probably do the community proud in making spam much more difficult to spread.

Twitter is the tool that’s quite clearly enjoying the fastest rate of expansion amongst social networking sites in recent months if the media are to be believed. With an angle quite the opposite to Facebook, it’s really all about following users who you don’t directly know. Although I do chat to a few ‘real-life’ friends on Twitter, the real benefit comes from reading the goings on in the lives of those who I respect most. Usually that’s musicians, artists, marketers, developers, photographers and so on. Celebrity following is probably what Twitter is best known for (Ashton Kutcher famously beat CNN News to 1 million followers), but I find that following smaller musicians and artists to be really engaging, simply because they have a lot of genuinely useful information to impart – and there’s a much higher chance of being able to engage in conversation with them. There’s a wealth of information resource available in real-time from prominent individuals involved in industries like marketing, SEO, web development, and graphic design – so I would guess this would be extended to lots of other fields too. Equally, following photographers who shoot for Getty Images for example, or for prominent journalists, you’ll find yourself getting news updates up to 30 minutes before mainstream news channels get a wind of the story.

But despite the popularity of these resources, it’s the slightly smaller ones that I get the best use from. My current favourite is Last.FM – a site I’ve been using for years and years (earlier as Audioscrobbler), and has been analysing my musical taste ever since. It’s an ideal tool for getting new music recommendations and for linking up with people who have similar tastes. In fact, it’s quite scary to use its ‘Neighbours’ feature that lists users with the most similar tastes (and I have some quite obscure ones, musically). Last.FM is just one of those tools that will happily and unobtrusively sit in the background of your PC or Mac for years without you touching it, but have some real gems ready for you when you do.

Flickr, in a similar way is not something I use day to day, but instead something I revisit for a few years every 6 months to throw new photos onto. I don’t use it to publish hundreds of shots, instead I pick a select few. But it is fantastic to have a super-clean / minimal looking site to present photographic work with, and receive feedback from a plethora of super-talented artists. Recently upgrading to a Pro account has also given me a few kicks from being able to read stats on the site, which were surprisingly high for only having 20-30 shots on rotation.

Last but not least – Spotify I’m sure you’ll know to be really ground breaking in the music industry right now. The site is not directly a social media app, but it’s playlist function really does open a world of possibilities in sharing music with friends, but also for opening up higher profile lists like Pitchfork’s Top 100 for example – again making finding new tracks infinitely easy and convenient!

Then there’s WordPress – just simply the ultimate tool for Blogging. Self hosted or hosted at wordpress.com, blogging just doesn’t get easier than this right now, and with its quite advanced commenting system you can add elements of social networking directly to your site. In fact I often use WordPress as the basis for sites I construct for clients, regardless of whether the site’s focus is a blog or not – it’s just a very advanced tool to deploy as a CMS, and simple to use too, making it ideal for non-technical client use.

For some social media sites it’s very clear to see the undeniable power of an invite-only system as a free marketing tool. Google the term ‘Ffffound‘ (one of my favourite sites) and you’ll find page upon page of requests on forums for an invite. Similarly over the past few weeks, you’ll find the same for Google Wave invites, even though media coverage for the tool has been relatively minimal and quite few people can actually tell me what the tool does. There’s definitely an element of desire acting heavily on this – people just don’t want to be left out, regardless of whether a site or tool is directly useful to them.

I’ve missed some in that list like YouTube, Blogger, and torrent sites for example, which all have great social elements, but I’m not a big user or fan of any and this really is primarily a personal list. It’s going to be really interesting to see quite what’s next on the social media front!