Brett of the Best of Brett blog invited to me to read and take part in his "The Real Reasons to Social Networking Writing Project". He's treating it like a meme, but I won't. Memes normally require you to tag other people to do the same and I won't do that. If you read his article and decide to treat it like a meme, so be it.

Brett is planning to use the information he gathers to write an e-book, a guide with marketing strategies to effectively use the social networks. In his article he asks, "So do you feel social networks are actually useful and how do you use them?" That's a pretty broad question which begs a pretty broad answer.

I belong to several social networks: StumbleUpon, Digg, Propeller (formerly Netscape), MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BUMPzee and more that I can't remember offhand. What purposes do they serve for me specifically? Contacts. I've been sucked into discussions on some of them in the past and refrain from doing so nowadays because it takes me away from the things that I really want to do. In my opinion, the value of the contacts is worth more than the value of the discussions.

I browse the social networks on occasion, but not every day for every one of them. Who has that kind of time? Anyway, browsing them shows me what everyone is talking about and gives me ideas on what I should be writing about. I also pick up useful news items as well as tidbits that I can put to use immediately. I can't even begin to tell you what I've picked up just by browsing.

I get invited to participate in discussion groups fairly frequently. I usually join the groups and get involved only when I have the time. (With my computer and DSL problems of late, I'm lucky to get online at all sometimes.)

I've told you what I use social networks for, so what do YOU use them for?