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Community WebsitesThe Internet Community was first described as a "Global Village" back in the 1980's, because it allowed people from around the world to use their computers to communicate with one another. The Internet was designed as a communication medium with its heritage derived from the telecommunications industry, and first the binary code ( Morse Code) developed in the early 1840's that allowed people to send short text messages to one another over long distances in an instant. Computer scientists, software engineers and people in the other technical professions have been using the Internet to communicate with each other for decades. Starting back in the 1970's the Internet had only a few thousand users at big time technical colleges, military installations and research facilities. Today just about everyone in the world has access to a computer and a high speed connection to the Internet. Today's users expect a lot more from the Internet then a place to store data and send messages. Because, they want to interact with other people and they expect a response as quickly as they can get it. Facebook is one of the biggest social networks and has almost unlimited business potential, because they have has an advertising program that allows you to target you ads to people based on their profile. Using this method you can target people globally by something that are interested in or target everyone locally in a single zip code. For example, we have a community page for our business that we promote to the Linux Community on Facebook: Software Freedom Innovation's Facebook Page BrightKiteBrightKite's "wall" feature has makes us feel like we are hanging out at the "Village Green" of the Internet. It's fun to watch the wall as pictures and postings srcoll by us in real time. When there is something interesting you can look at people's profile and reach out to people around the world that share an interest with you. When people reach back to you accept their friend requests and/or answer there messages. http://brightkite.com/people/feravolo MySpaceIf you have an interest in the music or entertainment industry this network is essential. MySpace is a good place to market to the demographic that it serves. Other types of businesses should use MySpace only if they have already established a following. http://www.myspace.com/feravolo Linkedin is your an electronic Rolodex and a great place to keep a copy of your resume, and you can seek out discussions in the groups that are applicable to your trade. http://www.linkedin.com/in/feravolo MashableA goldmine for the Bozo that thinks Internet Communities are their personal spammatorium, because they claim to be geared to people that are interested in using the Internet for business. NOTE: It looks like they deleted our account here and we really don't care. Broadcasters and the press use Twitter as channel to report breaking news events in real time. Businesses can use Twitter is to report to their customers special prices and sales events to people that choose to follow them or bookmark their feed. Twitter allows people to post short ( 140-160 characters ) messages. Using technology originally designed for cellular phone networks. Twitter also allows you to post messages from your phone using the short code: 40404. Twitter is not suitable for every business, for example we deleted our Twitter Account because it's not suited for our business. You don't need to be one every network that you can find, only the networks that you can find the time to use effectively. Photo Sharing NetworksPhotos are one of the things that makes Social Networking popular and now that more people use digital cameras then film and the cell phone carema is now today's "instantamatic" camera. These site let you store your pictures on-line and share them with your friends, and you are able to lick them to other sites like BrightKite. Flicker: http://flickr.com/photos/feravolo Panoramio: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/18047765 Meetup GroupsMeetup is a great way to combine the resources of the Internet with real life events. The downside is that groups take a long time to get established and you need to give it time to work for you. When you get the opportunity take over an established group with a large number of members only solves the numbers problem. You still have to work on establishing the events and getting those people to show up. Orlando Entrepreneur Meetup Group Software Freedom is about Innovation and taking advantage of resources that your competition doesn't even know exist. We can work with your on the Internet, by telephone or in person depending on the scope of your project and the requirements of your business. Software Freedom Innovations  |