Lemme Lemme Upgrade Yaaaaaaa

As I logged on to my twitter this week I noticed that they have made some useful changes for users. At first glance, I didn't really look into the new "lists" gadget that was added, mostly because I figured it was just something stupid and I didn't feel like wasting time learning how to use it. Reluctantly, my roommate looked into it and explained to me how they worked and how useful she found them to be. Basically, twitter now allows you to create your own lists of people (sort of like separating people into networks on facebook) and then twitter shows you more of these people on your home page. This new gadget would only be useful for people who follow a lot of people of twitter such as celebrities and politicians.

Say you follow +200 people on twitter but only 10-15 of those people are your close friends or people that you actually know, once you add your close friends to a "list" twitter will show you more of these people's latest tweets. This saves me a lot of time because sometimes I don't really care about the 25 tweets that Kim Kardashian posts daily, and I would rather read about what my friends have to say. After learning about this new aspect it reminded me of a topic that we discussed in class on Wednesday about receiver costs. This new tool saves me time because I do not have to waste my time scrolling down my entire homepage to see what my friends have to say. In a way, these "lists" act more like filters, when I only want to read certain peoples tweets I can go to my lists, but when I'm bored surfing the web I can also read the tweets of people that I find interesting but may not necessarily know in real life.

tweet tweet

So when twitter started to become popular, I refused to get an account. I figured that is was the same thing as updating my facebook status, and who would want to read what I'm doing twice, and in two different media platforms at that. As soon as all my friends were talking about their tweets from the day and funny things that people had posted, I began to feel out of the loop, almost like I was missing out of the coolest party of the weekend. Eventually I caved and created an account. This goes to show two things: 1. I lack a huge amount of self-control, I mean who is lame enough to fall to the temptations of an SNS and 2. it goes to show just how powerful SNS's are, once all your friends have an account, your basically left with no choice but to sign up and I think that is why so many of these sites are so successful! Now that I have one, I can say that I do enjoy reading my friends tweets, and also reading tweets from certain celebrities that I like. My boyfriend thinks that the only reason that I got a twitter is because he had one and I only made an account so that I could look at his and stalk what he's doing. I told him he was crazy and that I'm not that psycho, but hey, it doesn't hurt to be able to read all of his tweets now!

Should we really trust Facebook?

Voyeurism is an interesting topic to discuss when thinking about social networking sites and how I actively participate in them. After reading the article "Myspace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs" by Kevin Pouslen, I was appalled to learn that such a situation was happening. I do not have a myspace account, but I do have an account with facebook, and immediately after reading it I went to check my privacy settings. I reassured myself that my entire profile was set to private and the only people that could see anything were people whom I was already friends with. Then I got to thinking, who am I to trust facebook? How do I know that facebook promises me that the privacy settings which I chose will be honored? This made me feel extremely alarmed, I absolutely do not want some online voyeur looking through my pictures. As of right now I am not sure of any precautions I can take other than to be extremely careful about what I post online, other than that my only other option would be to completely deactivate my account. Another student in our class wrote in his blog that he de-activates his account when he is not using it so that people can not see that he even has a facebook (alittlelate4lenny.blogspot.com). I guess that this would be an option, but I don't see the point of even having an account if I am not going to use it to interact with my friends...I mean I would feel like a creep if I only activated my account to look and see what other people are doing.

NBA prohibits twitter use?

After reading an article online about updates in the news, I came across one which I found particularly interesting. It was titled "New NBA rule prohibits Twitter use", my first thought was this new rule was relatively dumb, I mean what NBA player is going to pull out their cell phone in the middle of a game to tweet about their latest updates? The rule entails that players' communication devices are banned starting 45minutes before tip off and they may resume use after they have finished their responsibilities, this includes half time. What was even more ridiculous is that the memo sent out by the NBA also mentions that coaches and other team basketball operations personnel are included. I may be confused but I have never heard about or seen an incident where a coach whips out his cell phone, pulls up his twitter application, and tweets about his life. A few weeks ago when I was getting the syllabi for all of my classes for the semester, there was a section in every single one of them regarding the prohibited use of communication devices in class. This seems reasonable for a college class, but the NBA? This just goes to show how advances in new media have become such a distraction in our lives. These players earn so much money doing what they do, you would think that no one would need to tell them to turn off their cell phones for the duration of a game. But, I suppose that the fascination of twitter is just too much for these grown men to resist!