Maria Diaz lady business. pop culture. whatever.

you’ve got the juice now

I'm really loving Twitter these days! I've been hearing about it through nerdy circles and signed up for an account in June but didn't really GET IT until my friend Brittany, who was in town for the infamous wedding, and is an old school SK user insisted that I had to get on Twitter immediately, esp after I got my phone. Now that I am no longer a slave to t9, it makes much more sense. It's basically a mini-blog that you send out to your friends and you can receive their posts, either via text (the way I get mine) or via RSS feed.

Now, I KNOW that the last thing any one needs is another goddamn social networking site but I really like Twitter because the site is so bare bones, there are no in-depth profiles or comments to approve or group invitations or anything. You either participate or you lurk and passively get comments. This in sharp contrast to Facebook, which I'm already thinking of deleting because it is getting so irritating to manage my (very small) friends list, those annoying applications and I hate how it monitors everything I do and then posts it. It makes me run back to tacky ass Myspace, where I can do things in secrecy. Speaking of, Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace is an extremely interesting article and a sentiment I completely agree with, which is this: "MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth".

In a smaller way, my myspace profile and friends list are actually pretty good evidence of Boyd's argument. My friends on Myspace are divided between my teenaged cousins, who have very "blinged" out pages while my friends, who are pretty much all college educated liberal types, have very clean layouts without the cheesy sayings, 100,000 pages of camera phone pics, automatic music, etc. And they are pretty much all moving en masse to Facebook because it isn't as "tacky".

It's interesting how all these things have become status signifiers. I hate when yelpers put their myspace page under their "my blog or website" link on their profiles. Especially when 99.9 of them DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE BLOGS. But still? Who cares? Myspace pages are those personal homepages we all used to have (under construction!).

And the whole gmail domination? I was telling Megan yesterday that from now on, I will only date gmail users. This is more proof I am an asshole - but when I meet someone and they give me a yahoo or god forbid hotmail address, I mentally cringe. But seriously, how lame is all of this? None of it really MEANS anything.

But anyway, Twitter. I like it. Add me!