Ed Gutman

I’ve been getting some flak lately for my seemingly excessive usage of Facebook, and it’s getting a little old. You know how much time I spend on Facebook per day?

About 10 minutes. Tops.

That’s spread out over the day, including my iPhone app. It really doesn’t take long to glance at what people are up to. I’ve found that my community of friends (especially those in tech) are a lot quicker at finding relevant news than the mainstream media is. Plus, I like keeping up with friends I don’t normally see a lot of; in the Lindy community where many of us are spread out across the world, it’s a great communication tool.

A lot of what I do content-wise is done through third party apps posting to my Facebook profile, much like FriendFeed does. I write a blog post, it’s on Facebook. It’s pretty easy to ignore things on a feed; you can click on any item’s option and choose “Less about [username]“. Or you can delete me altogether. Pretty simple, and I won’t be heartbroken.

I’m a social networking power user. I’m fascinated by them and how they are moving toward uber-inter-connectivity. Most successful web applications today have the option to, among other things, post or receive a feed from some other app such as Facebook. I’ve done that on this blog to an extent with Google Connect and Disqus.

Many of the things we do in everyday life may end up connected in some way; this guy hooked up his laundry machine to send Twitter updates. I know many people are uncomfortable with this level of intimacy into our personal lives, but our shift to a more voyeuristic society seems to be becoming a more common phenomena. Our children won’t care as much as we do today.

I must admit, I do spend a lot more time reading my Twitter feed than I’d like, but that’s a different story.

I get this question a lot.

I usually give a pretty simple answer: “It’s a very easy to use micro blogging service.” Most of the time people will respond by pointing out that Facebook does the same thing with status updates, albeit in a larger, stalk-ier, complex package (I would like to point out that it seems quite a few people who use Twitter are not avid Facebook users).

It’s nearly inevitable that Twitter’s the next big thing: check out this graph on Quantcast. They average almost 4.1 million people users per month in the US alone. It’s a meme in pop culture. Heck, I’ve seen it mentioned on the news twice in the last week. Twitter has tipped. And most of you too, will use it eventually if you’re not already.

Much of it’s main appeal is in its sheer simplicity and structure. In a way, it’s like reading a newspaper for the headlines, only in this case it’s your friend’s headlines. And with the endless stream of Twitter apps (I use Tweetie and TwitterBar) in all flavors of OS plus an open API, it’s integration into everyday life has become more prevalent.

Now if they could only figure out how to keep the thing running more consistently (it’s down as I type this) and figure out how to make some money, they’d be set.