Web 1.0 participants were fiercely private. Some even going to the extreme of doing all browsing on the web through a proxy. We participate on message forums, quote blogs etc.
Now web 2.0 types do this as well but now message forums are littered with multimedia. Everyone has to change their avatar once a week and it usually has to do with something NOT-SAFE-FOR-WORK or NSFW as you see on the interwebs. Some of my sports forums are so freaking hard to read now. Plus it’s not enough to read and participate now, people vote on your posts and you get Rep points. The greatest poster becomes Rep Jesus or whatever.
On the facebook front, my wife was never ever a web 1.0 participant. No web sites followed, no blogs, nothing. Checking gmail was a chore and why did we have to switch from Yahoo anyway? Now, I bet she spends the better part of 2 hours a day keeping up with facebook. She reads political postings from old college buddies whereas reading some blog like say Andrew Sullivan (don’t read anymore but it was an early success) was out of the question. She hasn’t jumped on Twitter.
Now, as much as I’ve resisted, I am probably going to jump on facebook. I am getting hits daily it seems from old friends/colleagues. Can’t beat em, join em. I also signed up for Twitter, but as of yet haven’t started using it. I found that during the NBA trading season many of my sports nut buddies were really on top of things by watching twitter postings of NBA players. One of the guys showed me some tools that make it pretty easy to collect a bunch in a certain way that it’s not too much of a burden to follow them. However since I am blocked at work and can’t seem to install these 3rd party apps on my “protected” work laptop, I am not sure how much Twitter I’ll be doing. I rarely go to the home computer when surfing at night, I just fire up the work laptop.
