I was burning some time online a few days ago, and I came across this discussion on FriendFeed about last.fm versus Pandora.  In the thread, this was my contribution:

.. last.fm and Pandora are both great but, like Twitter and FriendFeed, have completely different goals. Pandora works behind the scenes to tailor a stream to you. last.fm throws everything together in a huge pot and gives you the sliders to make a great listening experience. They call this "scrobbling" (actually, the AS in LAST stand for "Audio Scrobbler") .. anyway, like a stew, the more stuff you put in it the better it is. Add a bunch of people, hook up last.fm to your itunes, go nuts!

By thinking about the approaches of the two applications, and how to describe the difference as concisely as possible, I realized that this concept can be applied on a broader, more general scale:

With most internet-based social applications, they become more interesting and useful as the number of people you interact with also goes up.

Go ahead, call me a little slow.  It’s probably a blindingly obvious thought.  But after I had it, I started applying it as a hypothesis to different social networks.  I realized that most social media applications such as Twitter could easily be categorized into the the more friends, more fun category, but not all of them.  Pandora would be an example of a social app that does not require more friends to be more enjoyable.

So, for most social media applications, simple rules can be followed if you want to make the service more interesting, rewarding or worthwhile:

1. Befriend, invite, follow, reach out to, stalk, or use whatever verb the service you are joining calls adding people.  Do it as much as possible.  Tens of people, hundreds of people.  Don’t worry if they aren’t close friends or you don’t know if they will end up being creepy.
2. Poke around with the service.  It might have some stated goal, such as rewarding you with some abstract concept such as points or ningis or karma.  Generally, ignore this and see what you can get out of the service.
3. Find uncommon uses for the service.  See if it makes a good search engine, or gets free concert tickets or a better job.  You never know.
4. Try to find ways of cross-linking this new service with other, more established services you are already a master of.  Your blog, if you have one, is a good place to start.  Or Twitter.. everything links back to Twitter.  Or see if there is a Facebook plugin.
5. If you really love the service and you think you will use it, invite your friends from other services  to it.  Notice that this advice is not point #1.  Jumping in the deep end is fine, but your other friends may not be so eager to go with you every time.
6. Don’t worry about extracting your social graph or bailing from the service if you feel like its time to move on.  In the former case, you probably can’t, unless they explicitly support it. In the latter case, a service stops being fun if you feel you have to use it out of a sense of obligation.
7. Last but definitely not least, don’t pay money for a service you have not tried yet.  Unless you are convinced that you love said service, you don’t want to commit money to it.  This is not to say that services you find awesome must always be free.  You are not owed a free ride and the logic behind paying for a service is pretty straightforward:  Somebody made something you like, and you would prefer to keep using it without significant changes or intrusive advertising if at all possible.  Your contributions will help that outcome.

You may ask yourself, this sounds like a grind, what’s the point?  Why should I keep doing this on one service after another?  And the answer is: 

There is no good reason to do it.

You will have to see if exploring a new service or application is something you like to do.  If it is, welcome to the social media club, my friend.  Those of us in this little club often need little to no provocation to hand over our personal (or at least carefully crafted fake) information to take a free ride at the social media carnival.   Sometimes you get the Ferris Wheel, and sometimes you get the spinning barrel.   Diving in and trying it out is the most direct and useful way to know that for sure.

You will find your answers to why you are on these merry-go-rounds as you gain experience with them.  You might decide one is awesome for networking, while another is great for conversation.  One is an amazing music-sharing community, while another is just brilliant at lifestream aggregation.

And, when you are sick of the endless circles and the cotton candy, you can always take a breather and fall back on those tried-and-true antisocial applications that exist just for you.