Thoughts on Social Media

Are you familiar with Twitter and Facebook?   They are the latest thing in social media and I have been using both for almost a year.   There are many things I like and don’t like about them.   Twitter is fun because you speak to the world (whoever’s following you) in 140 characters or less.   It’s right to the point and can get rather silly.   I am known as digitalKaren on Twitter and I usually post tweets about what I’m eating or watching or doing a few times a week.   Without even trying I’ve developed a following as I have followed others.   Some are people that I know personally and others are total strangers and some are just downright famous people.   It gives you a glimpse of their life.   Some people use Twitter as a way to invite people to read their blogs or visit their websites.   It’s another method of advertising.   I don’t use my real name on Twitter so I feel rather anonymous there unless you know me personally.   One drawback to Twitter is people who tweet so much that you feel bombarded by what they have to say.   I usually don’t follow people who tweet nonstop.

Facebook is another story.   I started using Facebook almost a year ago when my brother invited me to join so we could share family photos and family news on the Internet away from strangers.   Now Facebook has become the way that I stay in touch with family all over the country, friends local and elsewhere and recently high school friends I haven’t seen since graduation.   On Facebook I go by real name and therefore I only use it with people that I know in real life, that is to say not people I only know on the Internet.   Sometimes it’s like a family reunion or a high school reunion and it’s a great way to stay in touch with friends who don’t live near me any longer.

On Facebook you can declare your relationship status with your “friends”.   In other words you can claim relatives and show others how you are related.   You don’t even need a paternity test.   It’s nice for staying in touch with an extended family that’s spread out from the West Coast to the East Coast.

One drawback to Facebook is you end up getting information on a daily basis about your friends and some of those friends might be people that you don’t really care to know everything going on in their life all the time.   You can adjust settings on your Facebook page so that you don’t get so much of one person, but I sometimes have to unfriend them when they get annoying.   Ouch!   That’s the world of social media sometimes.

3 Comments

  1. SolShine7
    Mar 12, 2009

    You’re on Twitter too? Cool. What’s the link to your feed? And as far as Facebook is concerned that site pretty much annoys me. It was cool back when it was only for college students, now it gives you way too much info about a person.

  2. Karen of Scottsdale
    Mar 14, 2009
  3. Norm
    Mar 14, 2009

    twitter me this, twitter me that.