In the past few years, we have seen the explosion of “social”. Obviously, lots of people ask why. I feel that a lot of it boils down to simple human nature. People are social beings, regardless of their tendency towards introversion or extroversion. Introverts are social, just on a smaller scale, maybe even just one-on-one interactions. Everyone knows that extroverts are social, because everyone talks to them at some point during a party. On the internet, “social” is a little different. “Social” means the connections you make with friends and acquaintances on various sites on the internet. These sites could be social news like Digg, Mixx, etc. It could also be a social network like Facebook orLinkedIn. There are also lifestreaming and aggregation sites to combine your activity into one location.

Why has there been this explosion of all things social? Because social works. Obviously, this is a little light on detail, but that is also the reason I am writing a series of posts on the success of “social”. There are various reasons why social works, and social works for different reasons on different types of sites. What works for a social news site may not work for a social lifestreaming site.

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The options come as part of the newly launched BuddyUpdates feature for AOL’s instant messaging platform. The feature lets you link your buddy list to third-party sites including Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, del.icio.us, Mixx, StumbleUpon, and YouTube. There’s also an option to add an unlisted service, so you could theoretically connect almost anything — a non-Blogger blog or a FriendFeed page, for example.

Once linked up, friends can see your recent activity from the AIM sign-in page or right within the AIM window itself. The BuddyUpdates service is still under beta mode.

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