I recently asked on my company's blog, InteractiveQA.com, and on LinkedIn and on various lists "What's your social network strategy?" Specifically, I asked if people were on multiple networks, setting up their own, or participating at a corporate level on an existing network. The following is the result of those questions and my own thoughts and research.

A social network is simply a highly internetworked and active community. Frank Diana, Chief Product Officer at Aelera called it "an evolution of collaboration technologies."

We build and test social networks, so it's important for us to know about them. It's also a good way to find clients, vendors, employees and great ideas. Some are good for one thing or another, some have particular features that are nice, some are annoying for certain things. I'd like to share a bit of my thoughts on various networks and get some input on what great networks are, what they're good for, and what could be done better.

Network: LinkedIn
URL: http://www.linkedin.com
My Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshmccormack
This is the network I've spent the most time on. It's useful in finding people to reach out to. Increasingly, through Answers, there is the possibility for discussion. Using InMail (subscription necessary) you can contact people outside of your network without introductions. You can import and export your connections, but only their names and email addresses. LinkedIn occasionally seems like it wants to be a CRM company, and it's not always clear whether it's meant as a way to manage existing relationships or build new ones. I tend toward the later interpretation.

Network: Xing
URL: http://www.xing.com
My Profile: https://www.xing.com/profile/Josh_McCormack
Often in business networking circles Xing is pitted as the competitor of LinkedIn, and the more international of the two. LinkedIn will dispute this, showing subscriber numbers. If you check out Xing you'll see why people would say it's international - a lot of it is not in English. It's growing a lot, and there's clearly the idea of discussion on this network. At this point I'm not doing a great deal with it, though.

Network: Ecademy
URL: http://www.ecademy.com/
My Profile: http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=185539
I'm putting the effort into this network more now to really try and find the value. The intensive push to sell premium level membership is certainly distracting. They seemed to have done the "someone looked at your profile, see who it was" thing really early.

Network: Orkut
URL: http://www.orkut.com/
My Profile: http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=14937149394234602413
I've barely used this network, so don't have much to say. It seems a lot more focused on personal relationships, and finding dates, which I'm not looking for.

Network: Facebook
URL: http://www.facebook.com/
My Profile: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=534476038
I think I'm too old and went to too big a school for this to really work for me. I have 12+ years on most of the people on this network. This one really emphasizes the importance of the population of the network over everything else.

I don't have a MySpace page, and don't know if I will. I just signed up at 43things.com and might use it. I've used Ryze in the past, but haven't looked at it in some time. Twitter is obviously hot, and while fairly different from some of the other networks, it deserves to be looked into (which I haven't much at all).

Here's a list from Wikipedia of social networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites