I decided to spend some time this morning playing with some different kinds of social networking sites. Two of the sites - Reader2 and Last.Fm are of the standard “share your favorites with others” sites, and another - Squidoo - is the “lens” site I wrote about a few weeks ago, which I’ve finally gotten around to playing with.

Reader2 is a site where users can list books that they’ve read, or are in the process of reading, write reviews and recommend the book to others (or tell them to stay away). Right now, the user base is somewhat small, but they have an impressive array of books and topics. There’s a handy search tool, which links to Amazon to help you find books that haven’t been added yet. Users can tag books as well - creating their own tags (I invented the tag “folksy”) and use those recommended via others who have tagged the book. At the moment, its heavy on the SF/Fantasy genre, but I anticipate that this will change as more users join Reader 2. You can check out my profile here to get an idea of what one looks like.

Last.FM is a music version of Reader2. Users can add music via an application that uploads music you’ve played on iTunes or Windows Media Player, or via Last FM radio, which lets users create custom radio stations based on music they like. After several attempts to use the iTunes/Last.FM plugin, I switched to the Radio option, which runs on the Last.FM site. The Radio option is easy to use, and I found songs I was into instantly. My only complaint is that Last.FM doesn’t let users upload or input bands/songs in by themselves - for example, I can’t type in “Johnny Cash” and pick songs I like by him unless he pops up on the Last.FM Radio player (I’m hoping this will be included at some point). To get a feel for what it looks like, you can take a look at the music page I created here.

Squidoo is something I’ve written about before, and finally got around to playing with (and actually creating a few lenses) today. In order to get a feel for creating a lens, I started two on things I know a lot about - podcasting and knitting. Unlike my first time playing around with Squidoo, I found it really easy to create a lens, though I still wish each category was explained a little bit more.