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I have participated in social networking for about five years. It started with facebook. After that it didn't take long before I had a myspace page.

When I finished college, facebook was still a bit of an elitist network. Not everyone could join, you had to be part of an existing network such as a college or university that was affiliated with facebook. Eastern Michigan University didn't agree to be a facebook network until after I graduated, however, since I still had an emich.edu email account I was able to use that and join before many of my friends who had graduated before me.

Myspace at the time was the undisputed social network king at the time. Tens of millions of profiles! Once facebook opened its doors to high schools, the general public and then business and "things and places" it qrew much faster than myspace and has taken over as king particularly on the networking end. While myspace certainly provides more customization, facebook displays tons of information about many people in a way that is extremely easy to navigate.

Then here comes this twitter thing...again. I say again because twitter is not a new thing. I created a twitter account a year or so ago but it had been around a while before that. All twitter really is is a website that lets you send quick text updates to your subscribers. Now, facebook has something similar, It used to be called "status" but a couple months ago was strangely changed to "share". As strange as that move seemed, far be it from me to criticize changes to the facebook layout as they continue to increase the efficiency by which you can gain information about those you wish to learn about. While facebookers almost always complain against these changes with complaints about the "new stalkerbook" everyone...EVERYONE comes around in the end. Whatever it is that facebook calls it, it really has the same functionality of twitter but its only a small piece of what the book has to offer.

So, anyway...the reason for this post was to talk about how twitter has come back on the seen. The way I see it, it happened in the blink of an eye. I left for Africa in the middle of March, came back in mid April and all of the sudden CNN is in a tweet war with Ashton Kutcher and every radio show I listen to along with sports organizations and even Coach Rich Rodriguez are tweeting away.

I mentioned this at work today to a colleague and he commented on how amazing it was that a minor cultural phenomenon could appear, or reappear as it were, on the scene, during the course of a vacation.

Needless to say, I'm paying much more attention to my twitter account and tweets.

So we have facebook for the networkers, myspace for the high schoolers and twitter for the tmz/gossip loving Americano yuppies.

And then the old people and come and mess up everything.