Twitter and Status Updating and Friends, Until I delete you

Twitter and Status Updating
The article makes a thorough analysis of the nature of twitter and the multiple aspects of status updating. For some, updating a status can seem meaningless, pointless and uninteresting. They see it as an intrusion to another person's personal life or an unnecessary display of thoughts and actions. However, the article touches upon the multiple effects of updating such as advertising, promoting, informing, sharing ideas etc. Furthermore, the article provides some surprising statistics such as that most users of Twitter are of a lower socioeconomic status and that they are younger. I'm not quite sure as to why these statistics hold; it would be helpful to have some sort of hypothesis or explanation about this. It would be intuitive to think that online users are adults with a level of affluence hence the ability to spend time on updating devices! On the other hand, other statistics make perfect sense; such as the one that Twitter users are more mobile. I do not have internet access on my cell phone, so unless I'm on a computer I am very unlikely to inform others as to what I am doing.

Friends, Until I Delete You

This article addresses the contemporary, cultural phenomenon of "friending" and "unfriending" somebody on online venues such as Myspace/Facebook etc. I must say that I have "suffered" the consequences of becoming somebody's friend on facebook and later on regretting it since this is someone I have seen once and will never see again, but then feeling embarrassed to do so at the risk of seeming "dramatic, snubby and full of myself". This article does a really good job of expressing the various ways in which social and casual relations have changed in nature, ever since online friendships took place. Now we now what our 1st grade classmate whom we haven't seen in 25 years in up to and our bosses can now where we went Saturday night. The process of occassional massive deletes seems like a good idea in order to keep Facebook and similar services somewhat useful and unobtrusive.