Social Media

Social Media has become something of a ubiquitous presence on the web, and one of the major reasons for people logging on – be it to upload photographs, write a blog entry, send a message to friend or simply pass on an amusing (or otherwise) video clip. Essentially, social media and the technologies involved, allow for the forming of certain online communities based around more traditional friend groups or those involving more disparate people forming a group around a shared love for a certain topic (say a band or a writer) or place.

The forms that these social media networks take vary markedly in complexity. Some are simple link sharing systems, such as Delicious and Digg, in which you tag and store certain web pages that you may wish to read later or share with others; RSS readers also enable this function in that you can share certain items stored in your reader, for instance starred items in Google Reader. We have included this functionality within all pages of the website so if you see something you might like to share then please go ahead and hover over the ‘Share’ button at the top of each page.

By far the biggest of recent phenomena has been Facebook, which has seen a meteoric growth, with figures upwards of 123m for May of this year (2008) alone. With this growth there has been a huge rise in the number of online communities, with groups springing up around all kinds of topics and subjects. We have recently set up our very own The Gambia Experience Facebook page and hope to encourage people to become fans, upload photographs, join discussions and put forward ideas for the company as a whole. Come and find us and join in!  

This year's buzz is around the Twitter application. Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging tool, very similar to the status update within Facebook. Very easy to update via your mobile phone or blackberry it has seen many celebrities signing up and gaining thousands of followers - the most famous of these being Stephen Fry. You can find The Gambia Experience on Twitter here: The Gambia Experience Twitter feed