Social networking offers novel opportunities for keeping the mind active as people are approaching the golden age. Social networking is all about communication. People with common interests are able to share information with each other through a variety of social networking sites created specifically to make sharing, communicating, and creating information as simple and efficient as possible. There are over 100 different websites used for social networking around the world by different groups. In North America, the most popular sites for social networking are:
1. Facebook for general communication with over 500 million users;
2. Twitter for micro-blogging and RSS with about 175 million users;
3. Care2 for green living and social activism with 10 million users;
4. Flixter for movies with 63 million users;
5. Fickr for sharing photos with 32 million users;
6. Linkedin for business and professional networking with 80 million users;
7. MyLife for locating friends and family with 51 million users;
8. My Space for general networking with 130 million users;
9. WAYN for travel and lifestyle with 10 million users; and
10. Windows Life Spaces for blogging with 120 million users.
For further information on other websites, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites. To get specific information on each social networking option, just click on its name on the above website and a detailed description will be provided.
I personally prefer to use mostly Facebook and Twitter. After creating an account on Facebook, I created my profile where I featured in the Bio information my activities that would be of interest to people I wanted to invite to be friends. Since I am an active member of Kiwanis International and am a former District Governor, I placed this information on the top of my profile. Then typed in the names of friends and Kiwanians in the search block and followed up with sending an invitation to them to be friends. Before accepting my invitation, people generally would look at my profile and seeing my involvement in Kiwanis and volunteer work, most of the people invited accepted my invitation. In 6 months I managed to build up over 650 friends who are interested in similar things as I am. Then I started posting messages about my activities and responses started to come in from friends all around the world. Every day now I see postings from many FB friends providing very interesting information on a wide range of topics. Also, several FB friends make comments daily on my postings and we are developing strong friendships on FB. But what I find particularly interesting about FB is the opportunity of following the activities of my out-of-town family with pictures and video, including grandchildren. For example, this Christmas my daughter took her husband Gil and two children to Banff. Gil is suffering from an advanced stage of brain cancer and his wish was to see the rocky mountains. Every day she took digital pictures of their activities and posted them on Facebook. On Christmas morning my son in Madison, WI and I in Ottawa were able to see in minutes as the children were opening their presents. On December 27th they went up on gondola to have a closer look of the mountains and we saw the beautiful pictures in the evening.
I use twitter mainly to post articles, pictures and information from my blog. After creating an account, I started to follow people who had posts and profiles on topics I am interested in. First I started to follow people, then they started following me back. I now follow 2,000 twitters and 1,300 are following me.
I am finding social networking very interesting and highly entertaining. I strongly recommend its use to all senior citizens.
