TMI

Too much information?

How is it I can know everything about you by looking at your profile, without having any actual interaction with you? Do I really know you?

Let's start with Facebook

As you know, just by looking at your profile I can know things such as: your birthday, past and present employment, (cell) phone number, e-mail, relationship status, where you where born, where you live now, who you are related too, your likes and dislikes, and if you check into a place I can know where you are and where you've been. This shouldn't be scary though because I'm your "friend", after you or I accept the friend request of course. Upon the acceptance of the friend request, I can decide without even talking or spending any "real life" time with you if I want to be "friends" with you. Maybe though, we can be friends because I see we have some similar interest. In reading your profile, along with wall posts, it enables me to strike up a conversation with you like some long lost friend. Twitter, though different, has some similarities as Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter may not be as popular as Facebook but it definitely can hold its own.

On Twitter you can follow who you want and as many people as you want.
Your friends and others you have chosen to follow you on Twitter may not get all the personal information as posted on Facebook, but tweeting (posting updates) can have similar effects as facebooking.

As we follow others and they follow us, we along with them update what we are doing, our thoughts, and plans that we have. (whether short or long term)

If you have friends like mine on Twitter they either occasionally tweet here and there or they seem to be tweeting every thirty minutes. Do I really need or want to know what my friend "sally sue" is doing 24/7 or that "John" is contemplating whether or not to get his genitals pierced. Do things like this really need to be shared with everyone? I may be your friend but some things should be left unsaid. This also goes saying this about Facebook, as well as YouTube.

YouTube: Broadcast Yourself.

Their tag line says it all. I know YouTube is used for many things, but being able to see videos by or with our friends in it, we see a side of them we may have not known.

For instance, the other day I was over at my friends' house when someone says they have to show all of us this video. Lo and behold the video was of my friend. I watched it and all the while I was thinking to myself, "I didn't know he did this kind of stuff." After watching the video I got on Facebook and wrote him telling him what I thought about his video. As I was writing him I felt as though I was there and in some way I was a part of what was going on in the video. In reality though I wasn't and why was I talking to him about it as if I was there?

This story is just one of the many times where conversations I have with friends end up with us talking about one of these three sites I have mentioned.

I was going to talk about Skype and how it is used, but I am going to save that for another time. I will say though, Skype while it may not give us much information as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube it like the others enables us to be with our friends without really being there "IRL". I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise if "real life" and virtual are intertwined, why wouldn't are friendships be.

In my next blog I will be taking a look at places you can meet new people and possibly have relationships with on sites such as: Second life, MySpace and Chatroulette.