It has been a while since there has been a great conversation starter on the internet, and this might make a great meme of the weekend. Mike Fruchter wrote a compelling piece on the state of social media, through his viewpoint, and this one is worth discussing.

The question is why do we use social media, or what of the “WIIFM” (What’s In It For Me) principle. While I tend to use social media to share what I think is important, and what I think is important is an odd mishmash of education, information security, and business, others use social networking as a popularity contest. Depending on what you are into social networking for, also tends to determine what kind of social networks you use.

I barely use twitter, but am active on Facebook and FriendFeed because that is where people I know or people I like are. I use Google reader because I only pass on about 50% of what I read via RSS and then submit that through FriendFeed to the comments of the crowd. I do this because I can, not for personal gain, but because at times this is for me the right thing to do, and a way to share those things that I find interesting.

I have been harping lately on the importance of community, those things that we share amongst a random grouping of people who we might never know, but trust us to pass along interesting information. Twitter is but one example of those kinds of systems; Facebook and FriendFeed are something very different. I have no idea what I did before FriendFeed, and that is ok too. FriendFeed is part of my social landscape that is where I connect with people I find interesting.

I have no idea how many friend connects I turn down in a given week, ignore or do not respond back to on many of the social systems that we deal with. I also know that building a social system is difficult; there is a lot of work that goes into this regardless of the platform or the software that you use. Realistically the hardest part of social networking is making content compelling enough that people will want to read it, view it, or listen to it.

That is where social networking gets to be interesting and transcends platform and in many cases motive. You can write to the crowd, or you can write to a small group of people. You can even write for yourself and not worry about your stats. My twitter friend count goes up and down like a yoyo, my FriendFeed followers got a nice boost but have stayed static for a month now, as many people leave as sign up to follow. My Facebook friends are an eclectic mix of people I work with, people from High School and people I hang around with, and all of them at times say things a little off color. I even had one Facebook group change their name to something that would be bad for a potential employer to see, so I dropped it and thanked goodness that it did not show up on my main screen that I dropped out of that group.

The reason I social network is to connect, new folks, old folks, friends, family, and the people who are very cool in this world in my opinion. I believe that some of the friendships I have made on Facebook and FriendFeed transcend the remoteness, when and if I ever meet them, it will be like meeting a long lost brother. I care what happens to these people, I follow them because I have made an emotional connection to them.

So why do I social network? For me it is not about popularity but to the value I think I can add to a conversation, even if it is a dry sense of humor comment. Many things I do not comment on because I do not think it is important, but for those things I do think are important, I try to reward them in many ways. I stumble them, I comment on them, I like them, and I find that sometimes, like today, someone like Mike, or Louis, or even Robert can come up with something that simply, starts a conversation.

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