Socializing with Social Media

Scouring social media is sometimes better left to the sites that were created for that purpose and that purpose only. Daily e-alerts that services like socialmention.com provide can help interested folk stay on top of the social media buzz about their given topic; for those spur-of-the-moment, impulsive interests that don’t require an alert to be set up, there is a comparable service to socialmention that brings up search results immediately upon entering a key word or phrase instead of delivering the data to a user’s inbox.

Whostalkin.com’s main page, a little over a year old, is a powerful search engine, starkly reminiscent of Google’s home page, with a 60+ social media pages website. The most popular social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace) as well as the most frequently visited social media news pages (Digg, Redditt, Mashable) are all taken into account, whipped through the Whostalkin algorithm, and presented to the user in a flawless search results page. No account needs to be set up, no recurring alert system needs to be created, anyone (with access to a computer, of course) can simply sign on to the home screen and type in an item of interest.

Speaking of Google, it seems that WT (Whostalkin) has partnered with Google to create a toolbar add-in. Users who install this Google product (iGoogle) can freely enjoy all the benefits of easily and quickly keeping up with their topics of interest at the mere enter of a key word without, as WT advertises, “leaving the comfort of [their] home screen.” Of course, if one finds enough solace in a web page’s “home” feel, then engagement with social media of any kind is going to be decidedly uncomfortable (at best), but that is for the masses to tweet and retweet about.

And, of course, WT has the ever-important-to-social-media blog feature, which is basically web space for the developer to indulge himself (and avid fans of WT) in IT struggles, social media musings, and WT vitals reports. But, for those that want to know more – and, since WT is API, anyone theoretically can – the information is all there. To contact WT, find them on Facebook, because apparently (according to WT), email is now already considered “old school.”

WT’s search engine isn’t always helpful, though. It may just be that it’s not very effective, or that hit or miss and searching is “new school”, or it may be that a user has to have at least a cursory understanding of key words and their use. But that doesn’t address the reason why social media sites like WT exist in the first place: as in, to facilitate the effective use of social media. It’s like using a word to define a word: if you’ve already got to know how to employ certain aspects of social media to get useful results, then the site purporting to produce effective social media use is just one more product users require assisting to use.

Photo Credit: Geardiary.com

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