Connected

Who cares what you're eating for dinner? Or if you're sitting on your patio? That's right, probably nobody.

It's still a misconception that people on Twitter give a first person play-by-play of their lives. I'm here to tell you that the majority of tweeters don't.

It's all relative to your contacts, but if you'll find just as much of an oft-worthless play-by-play about your friends on Facebook.

I joined Twitter with no real intentions to use it that often, until I discovered how witty the community can be.

Ideas are constantly spreading, each successive tweet and re-tweet showing it to a wider audience. Those with a large number of followers can really make a difference.

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) has over four million followers. Now that's connecting with your audience.

But like most areas of life, it's about quality not quantity. Over a few weeks I discovered how diverse the tweeters out there are.

Star of The Office, Rainn Wilson (@rainnwilson) constantly tells jokes--including those of the "knock, knock" variety, which receive hundreds of "Who's there?" responses within seconds.

Adam Savage (@donttrythis), known for blowing things up and losing eyebrows on Mythbusters, keeps fans up to date on what's happening with the latest experiments, but he's not always the scientist he is on television. A message from a few weeks ago: "Recursion: when your wife falls asleep WHILE watching videos from cutethingsfallingasleep.org, THUS becoming one of them." Geeks can be downright sweet sometimes.

You may have heard a lot about the message size limit of 140 characters, but it doesn't get in the way too often. It even allows for writing in proper English if one desires.

You can follow virtually any topic imaginable. Even if you aren't following a specific person or company, Monitter.com allows users to watch tweets with any word or phrase of their choice in real time.

Most of these tweets have meaning; 95% of what I see (and tweet) attempts to do one of two things: teach or make you laugh.

It comes down to the people, the community is what is keeping me around. Even if there are so many that voices will get lost in the noise, you get to hear what individuals are thinking because everybody is on an equal playing field.

BEYOND TWITTERLAND

Twitter was so intriguing that the next weekend, within 24 hours, I started exploring and joining up.

Digg. Facebook. Last.fm. Ping.fm. Twitpic. Tweekly.fm. Yahoo!. Flickr. HootSuite. FriendFeed. Google profiles. LockerGnome.

Is this going too far? People question the loss of their anonymity when signing up for online services. Most websites don't ask for something you would not tell most people anyway--your name, e-mail address, sometimes birthday.

Sure all these can be fabricated, but wouldn't that just make it more difficult for others to find you? And isn't that really the point of all this?

It is for me. Tell others what you think. Spread your message. Connect with other people. Change the world. Change yourself. You will eventually find an audience if you care about what you say.

As with anything in life, you take out what you put in. You probably won't have a hundred followers overnight, constant updates are vital, but don't overdo it.

But still is this information too personal to share with the world? It's no secret that employers will check what their workers are doing online. As they should--everything you do represents the company that you work for. Nothing has changed just because the information is online. It's still common sense.

Understand that anything one puts out there, be it on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube is out there forever. There is no delete button. (Well, ok, sometimes there is. But there are ways to find information, even after it has been deleted.) If you don't want your employer, your neighbor, or your mother to see what you are doing, then don't post it. And if that's the case, then maybe you shouldn't be doing whatever it is you're doing in the first place.

There probably aren't many people who care that I listened to Lady Gaga and Marilyn Manson more than any other artists last week. Through last.fm, you can even see what I'm listening to right now. But is it really hurting me that that info is out there?

Tech enthusiast Chris Pirillo (@ChrisPirillo) has over 77,000 followers on Twitter and 10,000 fans on Facebook. Pirillo takes connecting with others farther than most; in addition to being present on most social networking sites out there, he has a webcam set up in his office that allows anyone to watch what is going on there 24 hours a day.

"I think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want to have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent," said WIRED executive editor Kevin Kelly at the 2007 EG Conference.

We know what goes on in the world; radio and television have spread information for years. The internet allows us to talk back.

THEFACEBOOK

So what's up with Facebook? It recently passed up Yahoo! as the second most visited site on the web (still behind Google, of course). Facebook was the last social networking site that I got into, and within a week or two I went from thinking it was a waste of time, to feeling that people don't use it enough.

The site itself is by no means perfect, there are plenty of improvements that could be made. Once again it comes down to the people: The biggest thing that Facebook has going for it, is simply the sheer number of people that are registered.