Social media is (according to Safko & Brake, 2009) a jungle, or stated otherwise a defined area where things eat each other to survive. A perfect metaphor for business. Biologists would call a jungle an ecosystem, a good term to use here. In an effort to talk about ecosystems, biologists have developed a classification system to group and categorize the animals, plants, bacteria, fungi and protista that inhabit the ecosystem. Using this system makes it easier to talk about the living world. Using such a system for the Social Media world could also be a very helpful thing. But of course the Social Media ecosystem has not been a topic of debate and discussion for 300 years, so there is still no universally accepted classification system for Social Media tools and application. Safko and Brake give in their Social Media bible a relatively and handy 15-category classification system that will make it easier to talk about the Social Media ecosystem. The 15 categories are: Social Networking, Publish, Photo, Audio, Video, Microblogging, Livecasting, Virtual Worlds, Gaming, Productivitity applications, Aggregators, RSS, Search, Mobile and Interpersonal.
The following are the 5 categories I would like to describe in this blog:
