Alright, so I guess I'm late to the party. I finally got myself on twitter two days ago thinking that I'm going to find most of my facebook friends on there, we'd tweet around for a while and then the whole thing is gonna die off. What I didn't realize is that most of my friends don't even know what twitter is. Just as they wouldn't know what an RSS feed is. Those things seem like strange, confusing fads to them and I have to say that I'm sick and tired of defending myself. No longer! So those of you that find yourselves in that group, and read this blog only because it is mine, read on. Everyone else too.
The last internet revelation that I had was about facebook turning your friends into celebrity tabloids, hence it's popularity. My Twitter revelation is rooted in that it equalizes everyone. For example, I'm following Farai Chideya, who is a serious NPR journalist, a Burner and quite an active tweeter. I look at her tweets and I feel like she's letting me into her personal, random, individual mind a couple of times a day. I'm also following my favorite wine blogger Alder Yarrow of Vinography who goes to most Bay Area public tastings and tweets from them in real time. I hear a lot of people complain about how facebook compels people to announce to everyone every time they go to dinner, get out of class, or get hungover. (In my college days especially, I was guilty, guilty and guitly.) Sometimes, I still admit, Twitter is partly that, but the nature of it makes it so text-like, that the 140 character limit puts pressure on the wit and presentability of the sentence, phrase, quote or link. The brain gets involved a bit more and voila! Entertainment value as well as interesting insights into awesome people's lives get derived. The simple genius of it is stunning to a geek. The layout and organization will probably keep changing a little bit in the next couple of years, but the general feel of it is very open and friendly. As is the feature that automatically accepts those who want to follow you if you allow it. It was nice being instantly friended... ahem, I mean followed back by the wine blogger guy whose writing I admire quite a bit. Speaking of wine blogging...
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I feel like with each year down towards the next generation fears like those your friends have about Facebook and Twitter seem to fade. A little while ago a high school friend found me on Facebook. Until then it had mostly been University friends and friends from my work here in NYC. At school and at work I tend to be on the older end of the spectrum. At university people were about 4 years younger and at work some are even 10(!)
As more and more high school friends got connected to me and I started to browse around on Facebook one thing stood out largely in my mind, they ALL had private profiles. Across the board! It was insane. Meanwhile whenever I found a new work colleague anyone could browse through volumes of information on them (even though they might have limited profiles).
The other day I met a woman my age and she expressed similar concerns as your friends, privacy issues etc etc but as I meet people with wider gaps in age the whole privacy thing seems to fade away to non-existence. Of course there are exceptions but what is sort of terrifying to me is that if I find it so noticeably different now, yet just as easy to put in some effort to catch up, what happens when stuff is too hip for me to stay on top of and/or I just don't ever stay in touch with it? I guess that's what comes with growing older.
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