It's sweeping the nation.

Today anyone from ages starting as young as twelve to infinity and beyond can have an active account Myspace, Facebook, Myface, Spaceface, or maybe all of those at once. But that's not quite enough. Most recently, in fact this March, the micro-blogging site Twitter has become most popular. Twitter is a social networking system that enables those with an account to send and receive other users' updates. These updates are known as tweets (texts up to 140 characters in length). Updates are delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. You may be asking yourself, how many different methods do we need to tell as many people as we can at once what's on our mind?

In John Metcalfe's article, The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem, the title speaks for itself. According to his article, there are at least a hundred well-known actors, singers, business magnates, politicians and writers using the Twitter service. Interviews with either them or their publicists tell us that most of the updates are authentically written by the celebrities themselves and are available for anybody to see who would like to.
"It seems that — just like the rest of us — celebrities enjoy hearing about other celebrities, and Twitter lets them participate in a giant cross-disciplinary mash-up of a conversation," said Metcalfe. Ultimately, I suppose one could find it pretty thrilling to receive messages from their favorite starlets straight to their phones, people you only dream of talking to in person.

“‘I love it when they don’t talk with their publicists before posting things,’ said Mario Lavandeira…‘like Solange Knowles talking about how she was taking a lot of Nyquil and then ended up passing out at the airport.’…Erykah Badu and Q-Tip were among 23,000 people who received Ms. Knowles’s increasingly distressed alerts on Feb. 17, which culminated a day later with the tweet: ‘Woaah ...How’d I end up in the hospital?’” Although these uncensored updates to fans may not give celebrities the best image, at least they are true to their fans and eliminate some of the warped views on certain celebs due to the media and their publicists.

This new phenomenon of communication does seem to successfully tie everyone worldwide in a quick and easy way, but on the contrary, do people really need another distraction? With all of the existing social networks today, don’t we already know too much about one another? Don’t we make that a little too easy? Generally speaking, who exactly is this for? I guess I will have to make a Twitter account to figure out all of the excitement.