Web 2.0 Decisions You Need to Make

Web 2.0 is the social web: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare - anything with a community behind it. Web 2.0 is real-time.

Where do you draw the line between public and private? I want to make a difference in the world. As Steve Jobs so eloquently phrased it, to "put a dent in the universe." So how do I do that? Posting content online. And what's public and what's private?

In college, I took out a girl a handful of times who was a Public Relations major. Her Facebook page was all business. She had it so that recruiters could find it. Quite frankly, it was boring. I got a ton of utility out of Facebook in college. I think she missed out. (Just checked - it's no longer all business.)

I've been reading a book called Snoop by Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at University of Texas Austin. He and a trained team of students inspect apartments and, using their snooping skills and a checklist, create a profile of the person who lives there. The profile is based on the Big 5 model of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreealeness, Neuroticism. To sum it up: the personality profiles created by Gosling and his team were more accurate than the profiles created by close friends of the subject (in all areas but Extraversion). And in case you're wondering, the bedroom is the most useful room for finding out what a person is really like.

They also studied the relationship between people's websites and the people themselves. They found that websites were extremely accurate at portraying who a person was. Instead of pretending to be someone they weren't, the majority of people were detailing exactly who they were. They all wanted to be more completely understood. Gosling's web site study was performed before the Web 2.0 revolution. I'd love an update on that.

I love books. I'm constantly reading them. I would love to have a book blog. I also love Drupal development. I would love to have a Drupal blog. I have this blog, which is a personal blog - updates for my friends and such. I also want to have a church-oriented blog with church content. I think there's a huge difference that could be made if more LDS people posted online.

That's a lot of blogs. And how do you spread the word? Social media. SEO. Good content. Digg. Twitter. StumbleUpon. Facebook. LinkedIn. That's a ton of stuff to manage.

What do you let go where? What's private, what's personal? I have a lot of friends on Facebook. But they're my friends. I don't want to market to them. That's not why I'm on Facebook. I'm on there to keep in touch with friends.

My Twitter can be for everyone. Follow me. I don't mind that. But although I've had spurts of Twitter activity and I have TweetDeck (centralized Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and Foursquare posts) on the first page of my iPhone, I don't use it all that often. I don't have the whole tinyurl thing figured out yet. Maybe one of you can help me. I know it's simple, I just lack the motivation.

You need to do a ton of things in order to be relevant online. It would be a full-time job to do them all. So where's the best place to start? Content? SEO? Social Media? Viral advertisements?