Finally, Barack Obama IS the president. Much cheer in online platforms. Facebook is full of people who changed their middle names to “Hussein,” Twitter is going wild with posts and updates as people are watching the inauguration. I am overjoyed, not sure what this will bring, but overjoyed nonetheless. Now if only we can learn to accept gay marriage, we’d make our passage into the 21st century.

While I was watching Obama’s speech on TV, a friend of mine pings me with a rather abrupt message “That’s it. I’m yanking X from my Facebook friend’s list.” I asked why, and whether he said something inappropriate (knowing his cynicism, it could have well been that). My friend continued “Watching the inauguration on CNN/FB page, his noise to signal ration is pretty high.” OK, I ask again, “What did he say?” He replies “Nothing specific. I have no tolerance for that.” I replied “Well, he has the Twitter application on his Facebook, that’s why you’re getting all his Tweets on his status.” He responds “I know, but bombarding me with Tweets that say ‘OK now’ isn’t going to fly.” At which point, I understood. I’ve been there on both ends of the street. I asked myself whether I should install the Twitter application to Facebook long ago, and even did at some point, but ended up uninstalling it because of the noise/signal ratio. And this got me thinking…

An old friend of mine used to say, Facebook is a tool created by stalkers for stalkers. While I didn’t absolutely agree with this sentiment, there is some kind of a truth to it. We love social networking tools for mainly two reasons: narcissism and stalking. Tools such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs empower us in that they give us instant gratification in publishing something out there. Our thoughts, ourselves, our pictures, our feelings. We literatally derive joy in seeing ourselves in the mirror of the Web 2.0. Can’t beat that with a stick. We push ourselves onto others, so-to-speak. We also like to look at what other people are doing in the spare time we have from being self-absorbed, enchanted with our online image. Don’t get me wrong, I am guilty as any, but over time, I tried to negotiate what is acceptable on what platform and acted accordingly.

One of the problems is that although the industry forces us to combine all of these networks to one another by integrating these tools (which has a business purpose, don’t get me wrong), these platforms have different purposes, not to mention different audiences. You can’t tweet like you are blogging twenty times in a row, the audience you have on Twitter are the early adopters who have high tolerance to noise level that is being generated in that network. People who follow hundreds of people (of which I am NOT one) have learned to eyeball and ignore the noise and only focus on the pertinent tweets that are out there. That is a learned skill that we acquire as we go in and out of these social networks. Sometimes I feel like turning it off.

What happens when you broadcast your Tweets on a platform like Facebook which wasn’t initially created to send constant updates and whose audience is larger than those few early adopters? You spam people. I know, people can opt out from the newsfeeds of these overly zealous users, but as in the case of my friend, sometimes this does not work. So you are trapped with either kicking the person off your friend’s list, suffering the noise, or not logging on to Facebook. There are different rules of etiquette to using each tool and they are not interchangeable.

I think that social networks are great and they have their wonderful uses. I think that technology is great. But we must learn to use it responsibly, know when to use, which one and how much. Otherwise, chaos of untimate junk clutters our bandwidth.