Geek Week: 5 Top Social Media Applications for Real-Time Delivery of Your Holiday Greetings

My family is all over the world and having families scattered all over the world simply makes traditional communication skewed if not highly expensive. A factor that makes my communication skills a bit slightly imperfect every year especially during the Holidays. Relying on traditional medium like the snail mail, though I'm still a huge fan of it, just don't cut it. Even phone calls are not a viable option during the holidays. Too many people trying to call at the same time, the line gets jammed - big time! Which means time sensitive messages can't be delivered in real time as needed. But I found excellent ways to get around this...for free... and they're just right on your fingertips! Well, literally and figuratively.

Social Media Applications According to Real-Time Relevance:

1- Google Talk - With 193 Million Gmail account users (including yours truly) and rapidly growing, taking advantage of this service makes more sense, bar none. Instead of sending email which may take a while for recipient to read, voice/video chatting while both users are online - across the world - gives more propriety to its' purpose.

2- Skype - Fast-becoming the popular chat guru across the w.w.w. with 560 million users, it provides lots of fun features more than Google Talk offers. The only disadvantage I encountered when using it was the constant pixelation during video chatting. Other than that, it was easily accessible on both mobile and desktop platforms just like Gtalk.

3- Facebook - With the undeniably wildfire effect of Facebook's popular-power with more than 800 million users, it's becoming to be the ultimate meeting haven for communicating with family members and relatives. Though the chat feature is basic, it still delivers time-sensitive messages as needed.

4- Hootsuite - So far the best twitter third-party application I've ever used on my smart phone against others including Twitter itself or Tweetdeck. Growing with 1 million users to boot, it's a great alternative to SMS when chatting on real-time across the globe when you're on the go and especially when it's not bogged down.

5- Flickr - With it's rich features on sharing and embedding, Flickr now host over 4 million images. What I like about it is the ease of sending links to your album and the family privacy settings. It's the best way to send bulk of Holiday pictures to family and friends across the world in a timely manner where a regular email client can't due to size limits.

This holiday season, get creative with technology to make your life a little easier. They're within your reach and most of them are free. So why not make use of it?

What Social Media applications do you currently use 

to achieve the same outcome?

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check our GEEK WEEK archives.

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