ENTERPRISE 2.0: Discovering new social tools

I do consider myself a Social Technology beginner. Aside from my usual daily Facebooking and Instagraming for purely social purposes, I never took a real interest on other tools. So, this week I decided to tackle on some new tools.

First, let's talk about Delicious. I have to say that I was firstly attracted by the name, I was curious and wondered 'What makes this site delicious?', so I looked it up and sign on it.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks instead of just saving them in your web browser. For more information you can go here.

After signing in, I realised that it has a very simple interface, nothing delicious about it, and the first thing that caught my eye (and I hated it) was the big advertisement at the top. Maybe at the bottom of the page it would not been as annoying, but it was a really distracting feature.

I find it a really good tool for organizing my bookmarks, especially since at work I needed to do a large amount of research, and having all those pages in my web browser, got a little messy, and if I wanted to use other computers I did not have access to all my saved pages.

Tagging is the primary component in Delicious, you cannot create files, but by using tags related to your bookmarks you can organize them, find them and what is best, and see if other users have the same web page saved. And there is where the 'social' bookmarking comes.

Social bookmarking means that you can actually see other people bookmarks in your network or in the Delicious world and share them or use them. Just by tagging. Is in that way, that you can start following people with the same interests or work you have. You can start sharing relevant content with people at work or school and build networks, or you can go from one person's tag to another and find more information about the topic you were looking for. And if you want to have some privacy, you can have private bookmarks too. Just in case.

Also, it has an interesting set of keyboard shortcuts that I would have to familiarize with, but they are useful. Overall, I find it interesting and I think I will use it from now on.

My second tool choice is Vine, I heard of this one before, but always thought of it as the same as the video-sharing feature of Instagram.

And it is, actually Vine allows you less recording time than Instagram, only 6 seconds.

Elise Moreau from aboutTechnology defines Vine as a video-sharing app that is not just any video-sharing app. It’s designed in a way for you to film short, separate instances so they can be linked together for a total of six seconds. Each short video plays in a continuous loop, and are viewable directly in Twitter’s timeline or embedded into a web page.

It was a fun tool, really easy to use and by linking it with my Twitter account, it allowed me to have all my contacts. But I do not really use Twitter, I am a Facebook kind of person and sadly, Vine can not access Facebook friends, so personally I do not think I will stay on Vine. Another detail is that if I want to record a video it has to be using the Vine app and not my camera roll and upload it a later time to Vine, so I think I will stick to my photo-sharing Instagram. Nevertheless, the idea of using it within a business environment seems really appealing and I do get caught into watching these short videos whether they are made in Vine or Instagram.

Here is a video of how Lowe's (an American chain of retail home improvement and appliance stores) uses Vine and Twitter to attract more customers... and works!