While reading "Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do" by Euan Semple, I learned some key points and interesting things about Twitter and other forms of social media.
My favorite part of the book is the chapter about "friends." He points out that on Facebook everyone is your "friend" whether you know them very well or very little. There is no real way to get around it, enter Google+. The circles allow you to categorize the people you know into circles depending upon your relationship with them and how well you know them. I love this idea so much better than pretending to be "friends" with everyone. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all used to catch up with people you know, or don't know, but all in varying degrees. But in a lot of cases, you have not engaged in any kind of social interaction with half the people on your "friend" list.
This also ties into the idea that with growing networks, we just have not come up with the correct terms and vocabulary to express what we really mean. Somewhere down the road, there could be so many more terms and new words to apply to the current and future social media sites. We won't have to pretend to be "friends" with everyone because we will be able to have different terms to call them. It's kind of weird and scary to think about. But I feel as though social media is far from peaking.
So far, this book is full of insight and very helpful to see where we are heading. It is also overwhelming and somewhat scary if the subject it thought about for so long. There is so much more that we have to learn and that could come from the social media age.
