photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Over the last week I have seen a surprising rush of people in my life “getting” Twitter. It seems that every few weeks there is a little spike in the number of tweets that come in to me. I have a pocket of friends that sign up for everything, and don’t really use them. And I have one friend An Bui who legitimately tries to use every social media outlet she can find.

One of the more interesting ones that she has invested time into is Whrrl. At first I liked the concept, combining Yelp with Dodgeball, now I find it annoying. They have summarily ignored my do not e-mail me mandate. I don’t care that someone I don’t know has responded to someone I do. This was especially vexing on April 13th when they sent me 7 versions of every update.

I tolerate a wild stream of information from my PageFlakes, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, etc. but most of the time I only do one or two serious visits to these place in a week, except for SU, that is a more frequent visitation.

How much of your social media networking profiles do you really use? When was the last time you updated? The trend of reduction in communication – micro-blogging, texting, instant messaging – has made the barrier to use the number of simultaneous experiences you can maintain.

I enjoy having lots of information, but some days I need re-direct. Today I have decided to take advantage of Twitters inherent structural encouragement of Haiku. I encourage you to send one Haiku a day – 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables – it is a fun way to recapture your mind from technology.