What type of Social Network user are you?

Ahoy! From which port do ye hail?

An online multi-player game that I enjoy playing shows this whenever anyone asks the standard asl (age, sex, location) question. The game, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, is one of the social networks I am involved in online.

Disclosure: If you click either link and sign up for YPP, it will give both of us extra game currency. No real money will be gained though.

PC Mag’s Encyclopedia defines social network as “An association of people drawn together by family, work or hobby.”

While offline social networks usually stay small enough that you can at least recognize the other members even if you only say “Hi” in passing, online networks sometimes have millions of members.

Recently I was discussing different social networks with a friend. Allan came to StumbleUpon after he had used Facebook for a while, and had become quite knowledgeable about their TOS and their rules surrounding it.

I’ve had a theory for a little while, that you can tell which website a person starts with by how they use a new site, particularly StumbleUpon.

When you join a new group offline, you probably don’t walk in to the first meeting and expect it to be like every other group you’ve been part of. You don’t expect a computer club to be interested in the same things as the astronomy club, nor do you expect the chess club to act like a baseball team. Even within the same category, most of us realize that things are different from one place to another. One preacher doesn’t sound like another and different football coaches aren’t going to give you the same playbook.

But yet, when people join a social networking site online, they seem to expect things to be the same as the last site they were involved with.

I can understand it, in fact, I’m guilty of it also. I had been using Del.icio.us when I first joined SU. At the time, it wasn’t that easy to organize your bookmarks on Del, so when I found StumbleUpon, I thought it was a great replacement bookmarking system. Most of my first stumbles were merely moving my bookmarks over to the new “list.”

I think it was about the time that I learned how to add pictures to my SU page that I realized StumbleUpon wasn’t just for bookmarking.

So, which type of StumbleUpon user are you? Do you use it like:

Del.icio.us and other bookmarking sites? Storing bookmarks is what it’s all about. The rest is just added benefits.

Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, or any of the other voting sites? It’s the numbers that are important here. Friends count as votes , and the thumbs up makes a pretty good voting system. After all, it did work for Siskel and Ebert.

Facebook or one of the other befriending sites? I almost listed Facebook by itself, since Facebook users are usually cautious. They’ve gotten used to the vagrancies of Facebook and expect other sites to act the same. I really don’t know enough about the other befriending sites to tell their users yet, but I’m sure they also have distinguishing characteristics.

Of course, the beauty of StumbleUpon is that anyone can have a great time with it no matter how they use it!