Streaming music players through the internet have become increasingly popular within the past few years with well known examples including Slacker Radio, Pandora, and Last.fm. These services save the user’s likes and favorites to a database of millions of songs. This allows players like Pandora to create a playlist of songs based on the user’s interest and feedback. Features like these are what separate Internet Music Services from basic players like Windows Media Player.
Social Media is everywhere now in our lives. There’s Facebook for networking with your friends & Family, Twitter for broadcasting all of the latest news, LinkedIn for connecting professionals with one other, and even newer Social Networks like Pinterest which allow you to share interests with the world. Social Media is plainly put, the present and future of networking and social interaction. Now that mobile technology has advanced, we’re constantly connected with the digital world.
Gone are the days of static HTML from the late ’90′s. Also not so popular are pure Flash driven websites. Welcome to the year 2012 – where Blogs are the current trend, with the most popular software being WordPress.
WordPress has been around for many years now, but is currently the #1 Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and Content Management System. What’s really great is that it’s completely open source and free to use. Anyone can goto http://wordpress.org/ and download the latest version and install it onto their site. In a nutshell, WordPress is a PHP driven platform that allows you to create a completely personalized blog with hundreds of thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes. It’s SEO optimized to make sure that your site pops up onto the major search engines, and is also a great form of Social Media since there’s a great comment system involved.
You’ve probably heard of the many popular photo sharing sites by now, which include Photobucket, SmugMug, and Flickr. Flickr stands above the rest because of its huge user base and community. The photo sharing service has been around since 2004 – it was acquired in 2005 by Yahoo! and soon after became big. Since then, it’s acquired more than 50 million users and 80 million unique visitors, and is among the top choices for independent photographers. It also has a great Social Media aspect to it.
Joining flickr is a very easy and free process. Upon registration, you’re allowed to upload 300MB of photos each month, at a fixed maximum resolution. 2 Video uploads, and access to the most of the site and community are the other perks with a free account. The Pro account is very worth it though, if you’re an aspiring photographer or hobbyist. For $24.95 a year you get unlimited uploads at any resolution, unlimited HD video, no ads, ability to post photos to up to 60 groups, statistics, and much more.
There are countless amounts of social networking and media services available: Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter to name a few. It’s sometimes hard to choose and dedicate yourself with just a few since there are so many. Another emerging social media service that you may have heard of recently is called Pinterest – but it’s one that you’ll want to keep high on your list of apps and sites.
