Social media sites and apps come and go. Here's a wrap up of the hottest sites and apps (and which ones they replaced) through the eyes of internationally recognized social media presenter, Dave "Davezilla" Linabury.
Pandora came out in 2000 and it’s showing its age compared to newcomers like GrooveShark which have better recommendations and more diversity of music.\n
MySpace never did what it set out to do: Become the hub for music sharing. SoundCloud is just that. SoundCloud lets you share and embed individual songs and comment on exact passages in the music.\n
iTunes is becoming more Draconian over time and Spotify is offering more options that people want. Facebook integration doesn’t hurt, either!\n
\n
Groupon makes lots of mistakes and people complain about the deals being hard to use. LivingSocial has fewer complaints and is taking a bite out of Groupon.\n
Yelp has suffered from accusations of extorting restaurants and fixing reviews to the point that no one trusts them anymore. Forkly allows you to review individual meals (with photos!). You can even see what your friends are ordering.\n
Etsy is out | Heartsy is in (Heartsy is actually part of Etsy, but it allows you to see what is on sale at Etsy without having to dig through thousands of pages)\n
\n
Farmville is out | CityVille is in (and approaching 88,000,000 players!)\n
Angry Birds is cool, but Angry Birds Seasons are SOOOO much better.\n
Scrabulous is out after a nasty battle with Hasbro. Words with Friends is in and dominating the online word game space.\n
\n
Radian6 is cool for mass conversation aggregation, but VenueLabs is doing something no one else is doing: collecting conversations on a per-building basis.\n
Traditional sentiment charts and social metrics are being replaced by social graphs and eigenvector measurements.\n
Sure Google Analytics has a great display, but don’t we love infographics more? Increasingly, companies are switching their monthly reporting to simple one-page infographics.\n
\n
Delicious.com is still the best bookmarking system (IMHO), but Pinterest is gaining a huge following (and lots of press) for its beautiful, sharable, visual bookmarking boards.\n
Flickr was once the photo sharing king. Yahoo’s takeover seemed to suck the fun out of Flickr and people also began putting more photos on Facebook. Instagram makes photo sharing simpler and does one thing Flickr never did: gave filters to improve boring shots.\n
Netflix upset everyone with their pricing changes. Boxee is both app and set-top box and allows for more choice in viewing.\n
Skype is cool, but SpreeCast is going further with some really cool options that aren’t possible on Skype or Google Hangouts.\n
\n
Yahoo Answers used to be the place for quick answers. Lately, the ‘Best Answer’ is usually the funniest or most snarky response (and subsequently, the least helpful). Quora tends to have a better calibre of response.\n
RSS. Such a good idea. So hard to get people to use it. Instapaper makes offline reading much easier and has so many options for adding content.\n
People are complaining that TED has become the snobbiest conference anywhere. TEDx conferences, by contrast, are fun, inviting and more popular.\n
\n
Blogger hasn’t been in the press much lately (although if Google keeps their word and integrates it into Google+…). Tumblr is by far the hipster blogging platform of choice.\n
Facebook Groups are a PITA. Google+ Circles, Huddles and Hangouts are simple to use and manage.\n
ShareThis and traditional commenting systems are meh. Disqus, with its multiple login options, analytics and spam control are a much better way to go.\n
Like buttons mean little. Google+’s +1 button will actually affect search. That means a lot.\n