Being someone who has been with the Internet, or really more the World Wide Web since the mid-90’s, I’ve witnessed a lot of crazy things, and lived through the terrible Web 1.0 days that kids today wouldn’t even comprehend, there was no MySpace or Facebook, barely any AIM, no Wikipedia, and almost zero concept of forums. Everything was Geocities, Yahoo Chat, and BBS services. Netscape was still a dominant browser and Macs weren’t on the internet. Today’s generation has so much information at their fingertips that I fear it causes an information overload, that kids are so immersed with these sprawling lists of virtual friends and virtual personas of their real friends, that I’m often amazed these kids can keep up with all these updates, blogs, and the such. It truly is an evolved perception.

I do begin to question however where this is all taking us. Certainly having all this information is a good thing, but often I believe too much of a good thing can lead to trouble. Twitter, a newcomer to the social networking field, has taken up being one of the most popular services due mostly to its penetration into the mobile device market. The micro-blogging aspect of the service, 140 or less character updates from either the web or phone, act more like “status updates” you see on other sites like MySpace or Facebook. Where I generally detest MySpace and Facebook because of the “Geocities-like” effect on the web, it’s because if you remember how free website hosts paved the way for the worst HTML design ever by people who think bright pink text on bright pink background with rotating GIFs and flashing marquee text was FUCKING RAD, that is what those sites have become. Go see a MySpace page for yourself, you practically NEED a T3 connection to load the damn page faster than 3 minutes. Twitter however keeps the user home web pages pretty simple, with the ability to customize the page limited only to colors and a background image, no transparency, CSS, gimmicks, or crap, just a simple page with the user’s updates. It is for this reason I actually don’t mind Twitter so much, because if you really want to type a lot of words, there are blogs and journals for that, and while I use them also, I don’t blog/journal as much as I used to years ago, so Twitter works for people like me who just want to toss up a few short blurbs about the day, and mine are crossposted to Livejournal at the end of the day, so it is almost like writing a post automatically.

Long story short, when it comes to social networking, it can be a very useful tool used moderately and properly, but when it becomes an obsession, a sensory overload, or dangerous due to stalkers and the such, perhaps you need to rethink your Internet priorities. After all, the Internet is Serious Business. Or not.