Twitter and Facebook are both down (along with LiveJournal and perhaps others) due to a suspected denial-of-service attack so I’m kickin’ it old school by actually posting something on my blog. I know I said I’d “do a better job of posting here” but social networks provide so much more immediate gratification that they have been enough to satisfy my need to share stuff. I do want to post longer thoughts on my blog but I’ll have to try to find a good way to do it without just rehashing what I’ve already said on Twitter and/or Facebook.

In the mean time, please to enjoy a great British tea ad that is sure to put a smile on your face:

(Here’s the original comedy sketch on which the ad was based.)

My friend Keaven recently posted about his growing experiences with what he terms “the micro-blog craze,” specifically his success with Ping.fm which allows a user to update multiple social networks with one message. This prompted me to relate my usage of social networks in general.

I have been using Twitter regularly now for more than two months, and I love it. Despite its frequent outages as it grows in popularity (remember that even Digg had “scaling issues” early on), Twitter is an amazingly unnecessary and yet completely addictive form of communication that when I’m not at my computer I think about all those “tweets” (Twitter messages) that I’m not seeing. But let’s take a step back and explain what Twitter is to those of you who might not know. Twitter bills itself as “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Essentially it is a mini- (or micro- or nano-) blogging tool which allows you to post a short message (under 140 characters) via web or text message and allows your “followers” to choose how they receive your messages, again via web or text message. Twitter also has a powerful API which has spawned a whole host of third-party applications.
Continue reading ‘my social network rundown’