MomReviews

Social networking can be a valuable tool for making online contacts as well as informing others of your web presence. However, depending on what you are looking to get out of a social networking site, you might want something more professional than, say, MySpace or Facebook. Personally, I only have so many hours in the day, and while I do like to have fun, I also want to present myself in a more professional fashion online. Which is why I’m a new fan of Spock.

You start by setting up your profile page, my Spock page is here, and then you can add a description (I’ve re-written mine about three times), tags, and photos. To get started finding friends, there’s a link to click that searches your accounts on Yahoo, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and/or Myspace for people you have as contacts on those sites that are also on Spock. You approve the contacts and they become your “trusted friends”. You can also do a people search to find specific people who have created Spock pages. I searched for Barack Obama and was happy to see he has a page.

Spock also functions as a community. Other people can add tags to your profile (similar to BlogCatalog), and you can “vote” on whether they are accurate. If anyone reading this wants to add tags to my profile, or create an account and add me as a trusted friend, please feel free! Just be kind And have fun doing a people search-I found people I went to High School with as well as some former co-workers.

I also like the search feature, there’s an option to put a search link on your browser toolbar, so you don’t have to first go to the Spock homepage in order to search for someone or something on Spock. Very cool.

The last thing I want to mention is the widget feature, which I really like because it puts my photo and the links to all of my blogs into one neat widget box. I plan to use it in all my blog sidebars. Mine looks like this:

And, if you want to show your support for, say, a Presidential Candidate, you can also create a widget for someone else:

Spock is a useful social networking tool as well as fun to use. I highly recommend it as another way to increase your visibility online.

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