A few of the recent articles: Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me) from Drawar, That’s Why It’s Called Smashing Magazine from Echo Enduring Blog and Zero things I like about list posts from Janko At Warp Speed got me thinking about what are people using for what purpose, how are they calling it and how do people perceive some of the available services like Blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Warning: this post is a bit of get-of-my-mind type so it will most likely consist of different and maybe unrelated thoughts.

Blog is Magazine?

Recent blog posts on Drawar and Echo Enduring Blog and discussions in design community about low quality of posts and appearance of numerous copycats made me think about what is blog, magazine or fanzine and which of those have a right to publish those hated lists. Does anyone have a right to publish lists? Do lists have a meaning? Are lists needed for a design, or any other, community?  Does anyone have a right to publish excerpts on their blog with links to full articles on the source blog?

Lists, in my humble opinion, are a good way to gather some useful resource in one place and can significantly lower the time for a designer (or anyone else) to find either inspiration or a much needed resource. Some will surely disagree with strong arguments and that’s OK. If everyone would have a single and same opinion no progress would be ever made. But who should publish lists?

Maybe all of this fuss around list posts are just a result of misinterpreting the term blog. Blog is a Internet variant of the diary. It’s a one-man-show where a single author is expressing his stands, thoughts, views, experience or maybe sharing his/hers knowledge with the World. How often an author is writing it completely irrelevant. Can someone think in lists manner? Yes. People do it all the time! So why can’t an blog author publish lists?

Magazine is a group of authors publishing some related material on a regular basis. If a group of authors is publishing on a now-and-then irregular basis than it’s a Fanzine. Or is it? Do Magazines or Fanzines have a right to publish list posts? By all means, yes! Can you find a print magazine that doesn’t publish list texts? 50 best cars of year 2009, 20 winter tyres, 12 greatest actress of the year, Top ten managers of the decade, and so on…

And where is the confusion now? Because magazines like Smashing Magazine are using Blog technology to accomplish their goal! Blog as a technology is nothing more than a pen for the Internet! If someone is using it to publish articles it doesn’t have to be automatically categorized as a blog!

Facebook is Flickr?

If people are using and abusing the blog, what have people done to Facebook? In an article on Techcrunch it has been stated that Facebook is storing more images than an image sharing service Flickr and is brething down the neck of the most popular image sharing service ImageShack (information is dating from April of 2009.). And what does that mean for Facebook? Is it still a “social utility that connects you with the people around you”? Or is it a image sharing service? Or is it maybe just another online gaming service? Or maybe a mass pool service? A dating service maybe? To hell, it’s just about everything!

To me, Facebook is a great application to connect to my real life friends (especially to an old friends I haven’t seen a long time) and to share with them digital information that cannot be shared in real life. Also, from time to time it can be a great tool for any kind of promotion of services, goods, thoughts, you name it!

Twitter is Facebook?

What is a Twitter? What do Twitter’s taglines, which have changed from “A Whole World in Your Hands” to “What are you doing?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”, tell about Twitter and it’s evolution? With the first wave of popularization Twitter was called Facebook killer, but that has changed to Google killer and to nothing according to this article. From something that was purely a service for sharing thoughts, emotions and so on, to the something that is supposed to bring web 3.0 into mainstream… Scary when thinking how can people change a way something is used for… And what is it used for? For non-formal discussions, for any kind of promotion, for news distribution, for help in daily tasks or problems… For dating? Is it an RSS aggregation service for you?

For me, it’s a great service to connect with people and to follow people which are interested to the same things as I am. And it’s a great service to stay up to date for the things I find interest in.

Do you love or hate list posts? What does Blog or blog mean to you? What do you think how are people using social media services? How are you using social media services? Please tell me in the comments, I really would like to hear from you…