Technological hyphenate

For the first year or so after we moved to New York, I mainly chronicled our goings on via this blog.

Then I started to get hooked on Facebook and began putting more of my energy into that new social media and less into my blog.

Lately I've been playing with Twitter to try to understand its appeal. And even more recently, I signed up for BrightKite, which is like Twitter but with an even more narrow field of play.

What? You haven't been paying attention to social networking and you're still stuck at email?

OK, so Facebook is sort of like having a Web site, where you can post things that interest you like photos and videos. It's also a little like Evite, as you can create events and invite others, and it's a little like Craigslist, because you can post things for sale. But where it gets interesting is that unlike the Web, which relies on users stumbling onto whatever you post, you can connect to your friends' pages, and whenever they do anything, you'll get a notification.

Example: a friend from b-school posted pictures of her baby. We haven't been in touch lately and I'm ashamed to admit I didn't even know she was pregnant. Facebook let me know she'd put the photos up and in a passive way, I was able to keep up to date on her life.

Twitter is like blogging for severe ADD. All it does is ask "what are you doing?" and it gives you just 140 characters to answer. It forces an economy of language not unlike haiku. What makes Twitter different from blogging, though, is that most people see it as primarily a wireless toy. You send a text message to Twitter -- a Twitter message is called a tweet -- from your cell phone and tell the world that you're having the best burrito of your life or that there's a big accident on the highway, or ask a question like where to get the best Chinese food in D.C.
Like Facebook, your Twitter account connects to others. You can follow other people and they can follow you. Different from Facebook, where the people you connect to are likely to be people you know in the real world, Twitter culture seems to encourage following people you've never met, based on shared interests or common geography. It builds community instead of just reinforcing community that already exists.

Brightkite doesn't care what you're doing. It's like Twitter but it only wants to know where you are. I'm a little creeped out by the Big Brother potential for that, but you can limit who gets access to what level of detail. And let's say you see on Brightkite that a friend you don't see enough of is at Whole Foods and you're on your way there? You can make a quick call and arrange an impromptu meeting in the coffee bar.

I have Joe Serwach to thank for shaming me into trying Facebook, and Bill Couch for being my Gen Y social media sherpa. I'm still not sure what it's all good for, but as a media exec, I feel like I at least need to give it a try.

And since all this stuff is taking time away from my blogging, you'll see that I've now added my Twitter tweets to the right nav bar of my blog, as well as a link to my Facebook profile. If you really want all Colleen all the time, you've got plenty of ways to keep up to date.

Oh, and if you've lost patience for checking back here to see if I've written anything, you know you can add a Blogger feed to your personalized Google page, right? That way it'll push my latest headline to your Google home page whenever I post.