It’s taken me a while to get hung up in this. It started out with LinkedIn for professional reasons. I started getting back in touch with old colleagues and the site does a good job of suggesting connections. I started slowly first and then it gained momentum. Now I’m at over 300 connections and I’ve had interesting email exchanges with people I believed I’d never speak with again. Now professional blogs and Q&A boards are beginning to get interesting to me in tandem with groups. I’m hooked.

Then Facebook came along and some time ago I signed up for the obligatory account. Then more people joined and the updates became more interesting. Pictures and links started showing up as well as applications. Now my iPhone allows me to view and update Facebook anywhere anytime. Even updates to this blog can be posted automatically by iWeb. I’m hooked again and Susan is following in my footsteps. (She got into LinkedIn as well).

Finally, there’s Twitter. I’m still not hooked and I’m still trying to really “get it”. For now nobody is really following me, therefore my updates remain unread. However, I started following some Agile authors as well as Lostpedia and D-Link. From that perspective I’m received useful information and references to great articles on the Web. It’s slowly growing on me.

In short: LinkedIn I use for professional networking, Facebook for friends and acquaintances and Twitter for something yet to be defined.

It’ll be interesting where this trajectory will take me and society at large in the next few years. What kind of a world will Luke grow up in? Will he Google things he’s interested in, Bing or Yahoo! them or will he tweet about them or post on Facebook or something completely new and different?