mindgraffiti

I recently heard a second grader talking about learning how to use Microsoft Powerpoint in school. Wow. I know kids suck up technology like sponges, but how well are adults keeping up? Need a quick and easy reference? Here’s a cheat sheet for the rest of us.

Social sites
Generally a social site allows you to store, search, share, edit, and personalize content. Your friends can tag and/or comment on whatever content you posted.

Facebook/MySpace: Social networking sites. What does that mean? It’s a profile about your favorite everything-under-the sun, a place for comments from friends, and basically a catch-all area for the narcissists.

Flickr: A place to store, search and share your photos.

YouTube/YFly: A place to store, search and share your home movies, video clips and music.

Twitter: Answers that all-important question: What are you doing? Log in, post your answer, and set it to answer on the phone, IM, or on the web site.

Geni: A fast and fun way to create your family tree. No, really! Share your account with your family members so they can help you build and expand upon the family tree. No trees need be harmed in the process!

Prosper: Another social site, but this time only interesting to the grown-ups. Prosper is a “people-to-people lending” site. You can sign up and become a borrower, a lender or both. How it works: a borrower asks for a loan with a starting interest rate. Lenders then bid on the loan. They can fund partial amounts or the full loan, and once a loan has become 100% funded, other lenders can win the bid by offering a lower interest rate. Prosper is interesting because it personalizes lending and borrowing. You borrow from real people. You lend to real people. Each loan is tied to a face and a story.

News sites
(or what is loosely construed as a news site)
Digg: News stories submitted by users. Articles are dugg up or dugg down, depending on its popularity. Each user has the ability to digg up or down on an article once. So if a story has 3,226 diggs, then over 3,226 read it and dugg it.

Technorati: “Who is saying what. Right now.” Search for the most recent news/articles posted on blogs, as they are updated.

Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking. Store, search and share your favorite bookmarks with your friends, family, co-workers or the world.

There are many others out there, waiting to be discovered. These are simply a few I continue to hear mentioned in podcasts and blogs. So there you have it, a sweet and short description for the rest of us.