Arduous is on the train.

Arduous is at her desk.

Arduous is in the bathroom. Oh wait, now she's back at her desk.

Arduous. Still at her desk.

Arduous is going to bed.

Who wants to read that?

So, a lot of people get caught up in the lastest "you MUST text/IM/blog/MyFace/Twitter/Fanpop/Second Life et al" craze, but after a while simply either find the interfaces and plethora of otherwise useless add-ons too burdensome ("Oooh, look. My seventeentrillionth vampire bite. Yay.") or get annoyed with the email spam generated by these same (primarily) data-mining apps, or simply become bored when the Next Big Thing comes along to replace it, creating the electronic equivalent of Sargasso Seas full of abandoned, forgotten, and presumably eternally cached sites, profiles and whatnot.

It's just that, unlike other fads and flavor-of-the-month crazes, these thing never really end up in any sort of Internet equivalent of a dusty box in the attic, or a landfill, which is where previous incarnations of these kinds of short-lived pop-culture phenomena have traditionally been relegated once their limited life-spans have run their course.

What freaks me out is the UW Tower has RFID chips that spy on you in the bathrooms.

I ended both after a weird stalker found me and my family on the web and I realized how insane it was to leave traces of myself online of any kind.

I closed down my blogs, took my personal web site offline, scrubbed my posts off various message boards I'd frequented, cancelled my account on that creepy LinkedIn site and so far I've managed to avoid social networking sites and so on for long enough that my name no longer comes up with any hits on Google, even in advanced searches.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

i'm still bitter over my Friendster account.

But then I realized no one would read the comment.

That rhymes and rules.

Personally, I like it. I have 4 or 5 people on there - a couple friends that I like getting their 1-5 comments a day, and the Rifftrax blog because I like their articles. It could drive you crazy if you put too many people on, but with restraint it's really nice.

i do find whrrl more useful though (local service where you check in from a location and it tells friends where you are.)

It's different than your Facebook status because you don't have to include your name at the beginning. It's a mini-blog that you can update from your phone.

And like @16 says, you can have your tweets as your Facebook status message, allowing you to not have to log into facebook all the damn time, and you can use it via the web or from your phone. It's like a texting mailing list.

As Warren Ellis put it once, Twitter is a global non-sequiter delivery service. And I find that entertaining, if not always useful.

Oh, and I disagree with Kim @18. I think Whrrl sucks for the same reason COMTE @9 doesn't like a lot of the new Web2.0 services: You have to babysit it. I checked in at Moe Bar once on Whrrl and got notices about happenings there for 10 days afterwards, even though I was only there for an hour or so.