A little bit of contemplation made me realize that there are actually several different types of Facebook friends. Here are a few of the types I have:

1. Friends and acquaintances from real life.
2. People I’ve worked with online or by phone.
3. People I’ve communicated with by phone or email.
4. People I’ve been recommended to and will likely meet soon.
5. Real-life friends of real-life friends.
6. People who are my “friends” or “fans/ followers” on other social networks.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs with some of these types, but at least in my small Facebook network, I’ve covered all the categories of friends. How is your Facebook network doing, and what categories do your friends fall into?

However, if you’re a business, things may not be so simple. Facebook has been promoting Pages instead of account profiles for businesses. But it seems that to prevent squatting of usernames once vanity URLs are available, Facebook has put a few limitations on qualify. Mashable discusses it more in detail, but the gist is that if you have only a Facebook Page (which many but not all businesses do), you can only have a new username/ vanity URL if the Page was created by May 31/ 2009 AND has at least 1,000 fans as of that date as well. As the Mashable article says, that’s not an easy task for many small businesses.

So, you’re sold on the idea of using a social network for an online project that you’re involved in.

Question: would you rather use Facebook Connect to build a niche social network, knowing you’re giving up control of member information, or would you prefer to build a network from the ground up, thereby insuring that you have control over all member information?

Of course, the first option is less effort, but you pay the cost of not having access to full member info.

The second option requires effort and promotion, but does not necessarily preclude using Facebook tools/ plugins. If you use BuddyPress (which requires WPMU – WordPress Multi-user) to build your social network, then you do have control over customizations. That means you can plug in FB tools, if available, or write your own FB integration code.

So it should be easy to see that what you choose depends on your abilities or budget. If you don’t know how to build your social network on the BuddyPress platform, with customizations, or if you don’t have the budget to hire someone to do that for you, then you’re left using Facebook Connect, or maybe Ning or one of the other social networking platforms.

Personally, I like have control of data, when it comes to my own projects, and fortunately I can customize existing Open Source code if I want to, though I never seem to have the time. So the dilemma continues.

What do you think? Would that even work – as in be any more monetizable than Twitter? Keep in mind that a similar service, Pownce, got purchased by Six Apart and for the most part is getting buried. Seems standalone microblogging services will have a hard time against Twitter. But integrate a micromessaging service with another app – such as the way the status message is on each user’s Facebook wall – and then it becomes very useful.

So if Twitter decided to license out their technology to be integrated with the likes of, say, LinkedIn, MySpace, and so on, then you have a potential way to monetize. But where does that leave Twitter competitors such as Identi.ca? Well, I’m predicting the rise of BuddyPress-powered niche social networks, so you might see Identi.ca’s Open Source version integrate into there, in the form of plugins. Whether the latter can be monetized any better than Twitter remains to be seen. The key issue is where hosting will be done and whether people are going to want to have to remember multiple login account details.

Imagine that you log into your Facebook page and there staring you in the face on your “Wall” is a comment from a bill collector. Or worse, you’re being served a lien via a Facebook message. This terrible travesty of privacy violations is all thanks to a court in Australia who have ruled to allow a mortgage lender to serve notice.

This is probably what’s coming for Australian Facebook users, but is not a problem for American users, as it’s not a legally acceptable method of delivery for being served. But it’s an example of how social media can be abused. Can you say “change my privacy settings, please”, boys and girls?

Given that news, don’t be surprised if Twitter soon monetizes by offering premium/ business accounts with more features – for a price. They probably needed proof of concept before they can roll out such an offering. (That is, would there be any incentive for anyone to want to pay for Twitter?)

As a reluctant user of microblogging (aka micromessaging services such as Twitter, Plurk and my Facebook status msg/ wall, I’ve kept tight control of how many of these sites I use. So when Pownce had been launched by the minds at Digg, I saw no reason to use yet another microblogging service (YAMS?). Maybe others felt the same way – despite that you could share files with Pownce – because the site will be shut down in three weeks and be integrated into Six Apart’s Typepad hosted-blogging service.

If you’re someone who understands the value of social media websites and applications, you might find some value in Plurk, a Twitter-like site in concept, but which has a more interactive feel to it and a different interface. (Plurk uses a timeline whereas Twitter has a running stream/ river of items.)

If you want to learn more about Plurk, please check out my indepth review of the Plurk micro-blogging application and the environment, over at FreelanceSwitch. However, there wasn’t room in that article to talk about some of the brilliant features of Plurk, as far as social media interaction go. So here are a few things to consider:

1. Six degrees of separation.
2. Widening your circles of interaction.

One of the fascinating social media features of Plurk is that it becomes very easy to get to know other members. This is because person B and C can both respond and interact in their mutual friend, A’s, messages. So if you and I do not know each other but have both “friended” person A and tend to write regular responses in person A’s message threads, we might get to know each other and become “friends.” That in turn means that we might introduce each other to our other Plurk friends, thus in turn expanding our circles of interaction. As a person who long ago set a goal of either meeting or interacting with over two million people in my lifetime, that’s an important feature – ideal for anyone who uses social media to promote themselves and their work.

Now that’s not so different from the interactions that go on in a Facebook member’s “Wall”. However, that isn’t quite as interactive as the conversations on Plurk. The Plurk environment is more like a limitless collection of conversations that you can tap into via multiple IM chat-like windows. It’s also easier to first “fan” and then later “friend” Plurk members, if you enjoy what they write. On Facebook, some people have a rule of not friending people if they don’t know them in real life.

Overall, Plurk has a lot of potential to be a big player in the online social media sphere, even if the atmosphere is more decidely friendly rather than the more professional environment of Twitter.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Twitter. If you haven’t, I recommend picking up the free Twitter ebook from Geekpreneur, which I described here in a screencast earlier this year. If you have, then you know that Twitter is a communication tool used mostly as a broadcasting medium. Most people seem to either be using it to “tweet” little tidbits about their life and work day, or to announce/ share articles or events or products and services relevant to them and their “followers”.

For the most part, Twitter is not being used as a conversational medium. For social media conversations, I believe Plurk is a better choice. In fact, Twitter just does not seem cut out as a conversation channel except between members who already know each other well. My own experience is that maybe 95% of the tweet queries I send “strangers” do not get replied to. And that’s even when they have asked “strangers” to get in touch with them, or someone else has.

So the truth is, I have yet to find a valuable use for Twitter myself, but that does not mean I won’t or you won’t, eventually. If you want to follow me on either Twitter, I am “talespinner“. On Plurk, I’m much more informal, so I generally don’t give my username out, but it’s not hard to find me.

Dee emphasizes what I’ve been saying for a while: link building and web traffic take time to build. My feeling is that if you don’t have passion for the topic, it’ll show in your writing, and thus the traffic will never come. (Guilty, in the past, but I’m one of those weird “generalists” that can get passionate about many topics, serially.)

That’s also true if you don’t devote the time for consistent posting. Again, guilty, since I promised myself I’d post at least once per week here, but have slipped a few times. When I post, my RSS subscriptions go up significantly. When I don’t, well… they go down of course.

Towards the end of Dee’s article, he points out what I think is the most valuable advice in there: You’ll have a tough time getting noticed by the current A-C-list bloggers, so network with other up and coming bloggers like yourself. Some of you will someday move up the ranks. Best to build relationships now. This is what will lead you to pulling in a reasonable income on just a few hours work per week, like Yaro Starak.