The Social Media Landscape

July 21, 2008

Just the other day I wrote a post to give an attempt to define what social media is. So then I started to think about the broad range of platforms and tools out there and was thrilled when I came across Fred Cavazza’s post on the current Social Media Landscape. He does an excellent job of analyzing the many social media players out there and does an even better job of displaying these graphically.


Social Media Landscape

[View this image in full size on Flickr]

A few missing tools worth noting
There are a few changes that I would make to this hierarchy and graphic though. First of all, I would change the Social Aggregation tools to just be “Lifestreaming tools”. I would also add an entirely new category titled “Social News Aggregators.” When I think of aggregators, I think of social news sites like Digg. These sites are on the rise, becoming ever more important in social media and deserving of it’s own category. Other sites that could be included in this category as well as are Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit, Mixx, and others. (I’ve previously written about the importance of these sites, specifically about Yahoo! Buzz and Mixx, here and here, respectively.)

Another subset of social media deserving of it’s own category would be “Social Bookmarking” to include many of the popular bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, furl, and others.

There are also a couple of notable sites and tools that are missing worth mentioning. Disqus, which offers a great way to enhance your blog’s comments (notice mine) and create a companion forum for them should probably be under the Discussion Tools section. There’s also Weebly, a very easy to use website creation tool, and in my opinion the best available, which should be added to the Publish section.

Here is Fred’s original list of sites and tools organized by category:

I personally don’t use all of these sites he mentions here, i.e. many of the gaming sites, but stay tuned because I’ll soon be writing in more detail about the ones I do most frequently use. And the ones I couldn’t live without. :)

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