So, you’ve gathered your information in a profile document, gotten some photos together, created a dedicated email account using your preferred username and dedicated IM accounts also with your preferred username. Great! Now it’s time to create your basic social networking and social bookmarking accounts and profiles.

In the mainstream blogging world, I stumbled upon (pardon the pun) a formula that works pretty well. I joined every site I came across. I especially looked out for new sites still in beta (or even alpha) development - being an early adopted meant getting noticed by early adopters. If you’re looking for dates, sex, etc. that may not be as important, though it definitely does raise your profile level. If you’re looking for a way to promote your brand, it can be very important. You don’t have to be superactive on all of them - just having the profile set up is often enough. Plus, we’ll be talking about how to link them all together, so even the less active ones become feeders and republishing points for the others.

So, your goal is to join as many as possible eventually, but short term where to start?

(Note: Where possible these links go to my profiles on the relevant sites. From there you’ll be able to sign up yourself and “friend” me. Feel free to add me on these sites to jumpstart your network.)

Start with accounts on Friendfeed, Profilactic and Ping.fm. These three sites accomplish three things to do one big thing - tie it all together:

1. Mashups - Friendfeed and Profilactic give you a place to aggregate all your activity in one place for your target to read
2. Easy posting - ping.fm is a service that allows you to post to many microblogging and social networking sites with a single action.
3. Badges - Profilactic gives you a great “Where to Find Me Online” badge that you can post on a blog or other service. Someone reading your journal wants to friend you on MySpace - the badge shows them how.

Next, you need to build your basic accounts.

1. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site. That means, basically, that you rate sites as good or bad and StumbleUpon gives you new sites to view based on your old ratings, friends reviews, etc. It is great for those interested in explicit sexual discussion, whether you’re looking for sex, blogging about sex or promoting sex related products or services (but DON’T SPAM or you’ll pay for it). Why? Because they have a setup where you can rate yourself as “X-rated” and then lower rated folks can’t see your profile, bookmarks, etc. so you don’t have to worry about corrupting the youth or mom stumbling across you. Well, unless mom rated herself as an X - I can’t help you there. Be sure to install the toolbar - it really is fun!
   Another social bookmarking site worth checking out, with a “Love and Sex” section is SugarLoving.
2. Twitter is a microblogging site. The idea is to post short statements called “tweets” about what you are doing at a particular time. You can post tweets, which have to be under 140 characters, on the Twitter site, by email or by mobile phone.
3. Flickr is a great photo hosting site that now allows photos up to what I’d call “hard R” rating. They do allow full frontal nudity, but as far as I know not explicit sex, masturbation, etc. Flickr is part of Yahoo and tied to your Yahoo ID. For hardcore photos you could give Image Beaver a try.
4. YouTube is the number one video site and a great place for sharing your videos up to about an R-rating. It’s a Google property, linked to your Google account and your gmail username. It’s great for sharing your favorite non X-rated videos. For the hardcore stuff, try SpankWire.
5. MySpace is the place for your mainstream sex/dating oriented social profile. Facebook is great, too, but the site itself is just less “fun” and “sexy” overall. Beware on MySpace though as there are a lot of kids and their uptight parents, so for anything too risque link off the MySpace page and keep the good stuff elsewhere.
6. For your first sex oriented social profile, I suggest xPeeps if you have any interest at all in the various parts of the sex industry even as a fan. If you want to avoid that, AdultSpace is a good choice. The old adult oriented social site CherryTap is now redirecting to an interesting site I haven’t joined but that may be fun - fubar: the first online bar and happy hour.
7. Side note: AdultFriendfinder and Alt.com have added social networking features that have real potential with everything from friend networks to blogs, but unfortunately they’ve taken a harsh approach to any mention of outside sites. They claim this is because of spam, but it’s also a ploy to sell added features like “standard member contact” for gold memebers. These are still good sites and ought to be on your list, but they should only be a small part of your strategy.
8. Last.fm is a music sharing service. I haven’t used it, but certainly sharing music you enjoy is a great idea for getting together with compatible people.
9. One other thing you may want is a blog. It can be part of the “tying together” strategy, about which more in the next post, and also gives you some content on that FriendFeed. MySpace and some of the others have blogging included, but they have drawbacks. If you want a useful tool, Blogger is decent and a WordPress blog is even better. Blogger is free, a part of Google, tied to your Google account. For a free WordPress blog, check out LustJournal.com.
10. Other sites. As I mentioned at the beginning, you’ll want to sign up for all the appropriate sites you can. Pretty much any social networking site can be useful as long as you play by their rules. Get the basics now and save that profile document.

Once you have these basics set up, you can go back to Profilactic, Ping.fm and Friendfeed and tie them all together. I’ll be back in a couple of days with more on strategies for tying it all together and building your friend lists. Check back to this series for updates on other sites and a big event coming up that will help you find lots of friends.

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