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This topic made me think about social networks, how I use the internet and how things have changed over the years.
I used to seriously dislike the whole social networking fad because I think it pretty much killed ye olde fashioned forums. Now however I’m more getting the hang of it and actually prefer it because it fits better into my current schedule and workflow.

I don’t have the time to take an hour or 2 per day to check the forum(s) and post and discuss and stay in touch with everyone. I’m a husband, a dad of 2 awesome girls, I’ve got a job I like and I need to sleep every once in a while. So much for forums.
What I do have however, thanks to web 2.0, is a way to stay in touch with everyone and allow anyone who wants to to stay in touch with me.
My main weapon of choice is my phone, which has a camera, email, Facebook and Twitter apps (a lot more apps of course, but these are the main ones I need). I can walk around on my lunchbreak, take a picture of gorgeous Maastricht scenery, add a line of 2 of text and plonk it on Twitter. Through the joy of ping.fm it gets crossposted to Facebook, Twitter, Linked.in and several others. Facebook in turn is linked to crosspost it to Hyves and I’m done. 1 second. Then using the Facebook app I can see how I’m doing in Castle Age and Cafe World, automatically see what my friends are up to and giving me a chance to talk to them. It’s nice, quick, and it works. And I get notifications of any comments, updates or what not all nicely sorted in a folder called notifications in my email, also on the phone.
For the icing on the cake I still have this blog for anything over a paragraph and to keep track of websites I’ve got my custom news reader.
So all in all, it’s time efficient, fun, and it works for me. It was nice getting back in touch with someone through a short blurb I posted on Twitter that he read on Facebook about Magic the Gathering (which I still have to post about btw, we’re playing it quite a lot).
Web 2.0 works for me, yay for social networks.