Social networking sites - my experience

MY EXPERIENCE WITH YUWIE

I joined this social networking site on September last year, after receiving an invitation from Matthew. I didn’t know him, but as I am a “open networker”, I’m open to receive invites.

It was a pleasant surprise I received some requests for friendship in the next hour or so, and as well some mails wit suggestions for things to do. One was to add some friends. I had a good surprise; most of them accepted me almost instantly.

I spent some of my time on the site doing a couple of things: seeing my friend’s profiles, where I found several interesting things, adding the friends I saw online at these pages, and sending “thanks for the add” messages.
What really surprised me was the level of interaction I’ve been getting in the first days. I remembered when I joined MySpace, Hi5 or Orkut, I didn’t have such a number of friend requests, messages or comments. I was amazed.

What could I do next? What could make sense? I wanted a good looking profile like the ones I’ve seen. My first idea was to look at the way I could use to change my layout. I said, I want a layout with guitars on it. Made a search on layouts, find a nice layout with a Stratocaster on it. The black background made the white text relatively easy to read, so that was my first layout.

In the mean time, I kept adding friend I found in Home page, answering my mail and comments, and started browsing to see if there were already users from Portugal. I found just a few and added them.

Between these users, I found a Portuguese friend that had more experience than I had with online business. We exchanged some info, and he gave me important knowledge about Pay-to-read and Pay-to-click Sites. I’ll make an article on that when I have a chance; I think it is important to know how to recognize honest sites from the rest.

Interesting things I found for my page

The Playlist Player

Found easily that if I clicked on the player in another page, I went to a page called Project Playlist. I registered there. The process of creating my playlist was very straightforward.
I started trying to find some good Portuguese music available to include in my playlist.
Always found I have as an obligation to make my culture known outside borders. In a global world, our greatest value is the cultural diversity. As the music industry and the media contribute to standardize the musical tastes, I think it is a good service to my friends if they can “taste” different music styles.

Unfortunately, I was not very lucky. I could find Mariza, a fado” singer who won several prizes in world music, but not much more. At least for my criteria about what I consider good music.

For that reason, I made my first playlist using tracks from some of my favourite guitar players, like Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Django Reinhardt. Left the Portuguese music for later use (it is actually in my profile).

Guestbook

Found the guestbook interesting in several pages. Having my friend’s pictures from all over the world show like a slide show and having the locations in the map was a nice idea for me. So I did a similar process as I used for the playlist. Got the code for my page, used the feature to put it automatically at MySpace, and started asking my friends to sign my guestbook, by leaving some notices.

After I decided I had a decent profile, I started inviting some friends. Using the standard invite feature that let us to enter the emails. I had a poor response from my friends, but I’m not surprised with that. I didn’t have the notion I had to take care of referrals, though my friends would show the same interest I had in the site. Could not be more wrong

One of my best decisions was to show my page personally to two friends of mine. One of them was a Hi5 fan, I had introduced it to her some time ago, and she showed it to the second. I helped both to register and showed how they could add the guestbook, the playlist, and so on. Now they are the most valuable members of my downline.