"Social Networking"

Social networking tools can be used for anything from alerting your friends about where you're all meeting up for drinks to sending reports on national disasters. The article about Twitter, "Putting Twitter’s World to Use" by CLAIRE CAIN MILLER from the New York Times, refers to people tweeting about an earthquake and realizing the power of Twitter as more than a social networking device. People are turning to tools like this more and more for information as quick as they can get it. Social networking technology is often used for "pointless babble," as talked about in "40 percent of Twitter messages 'pointless babble': however the potential for the transmission of important information outweighs the rubbish people put up about their last meal or new haircut. If you can ignore the info you don't need, and look for what you do, social networking tools can be very helpful. Everyone is connected and therefore, it's hard to miss something. You often don't need to go looking for information, it pops up in your alert and you learn what someone else knows.
Companies such as Starbucks as also mentioned in the articles assigned, can use sites like Twitter to get the real opinions about their products. How many people actually drop suggestions in the drop box or even have time to? People are spending more time using social networking tools and people love sharing their opinions on sites like Twitter or Blogger. it makes sense that Starbucks would us Twitter to see what people really think. This can only improve how they run their business and how they make their products.
These technologies are constantly gaining strength in their following. Just when you though there was no more that could be done, Twitter came about, basically making facebook's "status updates" useless if you had a Twitter account as well. Who knows what else can be done. The dark side, to me, is all the space taken up but people telling me what they ate, but it's not hard to weed through and sometimes you find some gems of information. In the future, these devices will probably find more uses. They are slowly influencing and beating out news reports, one article mentioning the Tweets about the plane crashing in the Hudson before the reporters even got there. We'll see what these technologies can conquer next.