Time for another five social media links from the week that was. This week’s most interesting story comes from Newsweek (all of places), which published an article about a woman who tweeted about her abortion as a way to “demystify”  it. Controversial for sure, but it shows what a huge cultural phenomonon Twitter has become.

So onto this week’s five:

* An abortion on Twitter by Sarah Kliff, Newsweek.

* 5 Ways to Prevent Your Facebook Account From Being Hacked by Raj Dash, All Facebook Blog.

* Why the Social Media Aggregator Has Croaked by Caroline McCarthy, CNet The Social Blog.

* Avoiding the Social Media Pigeonhole by Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding Blog.

* Ten Tips to Improve Your LinkedIn Experience, Christine Pilch, BusinessWest Online.

Photo by Lachlan Hardy on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

This post originally appeared in the by Ron Miller Blog.

I spent Saturday at the second Western Mass Pod Camp at Westfield State College. A pod camp, for those of you who are unaware, is a gathering where people come together to learn about social media. As a person who has been blogging since 2003 and heavily involved in social media for a couple of years, I have to admit I was skeptical that there was much for me to learn. But I am here to happily report just how wrong I was.

Most of all I learned new tricks and techniques that I was able to apply immediately. I learned from Steve Garfield, for instance that I can download Qik on the iPhone for just $1.99 and capture video using the still camera on my old iPhone 3G. I learned from Christine Pilch that I could save my LinkedIn profile as a PDF, something I didn’t know was possible. I found out about functionality like polls and announcements. I use LinkedIn all the time, but like everyone else, I use what I use and I don’t pay attention to the rest.

As I was talking to one of the organizers, Morriss Partee, he pointed out how important it was for people to meet each other in this fashion. We all socialize with one another online, but too rarely meet each other in real life. Gatherings like Western Mass Pod Camp give people the opportunity to meet one another and make concrete business connections.  We need to get out from behind our desks from time to time and see the people we spend so much time with virtually because there is so much to know and so much to learn. And no matter how much you think you know, there is always more.

I’m thrilled I took the opportunity to spend my Saturday with these people, and I highly recommend it. You’ll be surprised what you’ll discover.

Also check out my video from Western Pod Camp and my post on how turn your iPhone 3G into a video recorder.

I’ve been hearing a lot of negative talk about social media lately. It seems people think a break from Twitter puts you back in the real world, that spending time on Facebook and LinkedIn is a just time waster where no real work gets done, that most of the interactions are frivolous. It gets tiresome defending social media. I did it before on my by Ron Miller blog in a post called Social Media Cynics in the Press Room. Social Networking on a computer is no more a waste of time than it is in person.

It’s About People

Social networking whether going to a Chamber of Commerce networking luncheon, a tweet up (where you meet people from Twitter in person) or exchanging information in Twitter, is a way of connecting with people. As Cheryl McKinnon wrote in a guest post here recently; Actually, Yes,  I Do Care What You Had for Lunch, these exchanges can be mundane or they can be substantive, but they all have to do with relationship building. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn give you access to individuals in real time, some of whom you likely would never have met without the power of social networking.

Real World Examples

This blog stands as a tribute to social networking power because Julie and I forged our friendship and partnership on Twitter. We didn’t know each other before, but we started exchanging tweets, but  before you knew it we were writing an eBook together. From there, we created this blog. It’s a real business relationship and a friendship (yet we’ve only met in person one time). I’ve formed several other connections including paying gigs through contacts I’ve made on Twitter, yet have never met in person, as has Julie.

So you can dismiss it as a time waster or a time sink or whatever you want to call it, but if you form strong bonds online, I’ve learned those relationships can be just as strong as any you form in person, and more importantly for many of our readers, it can result in tangible business benefits. The folks who are putting it down, clearly have not made a serious attempt at taking advantage of these tools.

Photo courtesy of hellobo on Flickr.

Guest post by Leslie Fishlock

Some people swear by Twitter; that it is the only place for them when using social media to interact with others.

Still others will only use Facebook or LinkedIn for interacting and connecting.

And quite a few more folks are proponents of their blogs, RSS feeds, Flickr, social bookmarks and many other social networking sites.

But how about using a service that aggregates all of these in real-time in one easy-to-use stream that provides a more comprehensive interaction with your followers and community? And provide a lot more content and search capability?

This is what FriendFeed does.

FriendFeed is what we call a “real-time feed aggregator”, meaning it consolidates all your updates from all your social media accounts and displays them in one stream. These include all social networking websites (Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn), social bookmarking websites (StumbleUpon, Delicious,) video (YouTube, Vimeo, 12 seconds) blogs (Tumblr, Blogger), micro-blogging/status sites (Twitter, Plurk, BrightKite), news sites (Digg, Reddit, Google Reader) as well as RSS feeds.

From there you can share your feeds with others, and each feed can generate discussions and commenting with your friends.

The best attributes of FriendFeed are that there is one place to suck in all your sites you are connected on, and in one stream, people can see all these updates from your recent Twitter updates, to new pictures posted on Flickr to your most current YouTube video you mark as a favorite.

It literally creates a community with a “one-stop shopping” mentality instead of running to many different places for items of interest to comment on and find out who is commenting on your posts.

While FriendFeed certainly creates a heck of a lot more content for you and great community involvement, is this good to have it in one place?

Some social media pundits say yes and no.

While it certainly addresses many shortcomings in social media, mostly the ability to aggregate all the content, it also provides a central location to track all the activities going on much easier instead of going to each site for interaction.

However, some folks, especially bloggers do not find FriendFeed helpful in that stops the flow of commenting to their actual blog, resulting of course in lower page views and if you are in it for the money, probably less money if your revenue is based on page views.

What are my thoughts on this service? I love it.

It’s free, you don’t need to install any software to use it and you use it on the web your phone, and, as I have it setup on my Facebook account, my friends can even see my FriendFeed feeds coming in through Facebook. I can in turn use FriendFeed and my status posts will show up in Twitter.

To start, simply go to the FriendFeed website and setup an account. Start setting up your profile. Add your services, i.e. accounts for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Search for people, search for topics and search for groups. Follow people and see how it works. Then join in the conversation!

If you make your FriendFeed account public then all your friends can see what is going on in your stream and can share with you, even without creating an account.

Some of the best proponents of FriendFeed are also some of the ones worth seeing in action as they use the service. If you like following people in tech, specifically Internet and social media, I would highly recommend following Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble, for starters. Robert is quite the evangelist for FriendFeed so it is definitely worth watching him how he uses it to its potential.

The biggest takeaway from this is determining how FriendFeed and other sites formulate your social media strategy.

If you are fine with a single social networking website to get things done, then stick with something you know and feel comfortable with.

But if your strategy is like most of us, then presence, interaction, search and content are the reasons that you will start using FriendFeed more in the future.

Leslie Fishlock lives at the helm of Genevate, a professional web development, design and social media/inbound marketing firm specializing in standards compliant, Ruby on Rails web application development for clients all over the globe. She is also the founder and #1 Geek Girl of Geek Girl Camp, whose mission is to educate and empower every girl and woman at every age level, on every skill level, at every income level on computer technology.

> Acting on a Hunch. Kathryn Jennex Blog

> Content Creates Engagement. Duct Tape Marketing Blog

> Blogging Truth: No One Likes Your CEO. Lisa Barone, Outspoken Media Blog

> Maybe Twitter Trends Shouldn’t be Automated. ReadWriteWeb

> FriendFeed Now Offers Real-time Search. Search Engine Journal

Photo courtesy of BitchBuzz on Flickr.