Twitter is great. Twitter is a bitch. Every day, for the last 8 months, I’ve faced this conflict. Twitter is a wonderful way to spend time online, it’s also an utter waste; it’s a phenomenon, it’s also a nuisance. Every time I log on, I do so with a certain guilt, as if I’m still in college and lighting up a cigarette. When I’m logged on I’m sucked into this universe filled with hashtags, retweets and links. It makes me forget the real world, makes people around me think I’m doped.

Sidvee, or rather @sidvee (also the founder of the very successful @kweezzz) echoes my thoughts on Twitter albeit much eloquently. He peppers the post with hashtags like most of us do even for mundane tweets.

"I bring my social network, ego searching, incoming news and various means of communication with me wherever I go. I pull out the phone at stop lights, when I’m waiting for groceries to be be bagged, in between steps at the ATM, in bathrooms, on walks with my son, waiting in school drive-thru lines, everywhere. And it’s not just when I’m out. When is the last time you did something creative on your computer — written a blog post or a letter, worked in Photoshop, or even read a long article — without allowing yourself to be interrupted by the realtime internet?"

Story of our lives?

"Facebook “allows [Indians] to do two things they love: Tell everyone what they are doing; and stick their noses into other people’s business,” says Sree Sreenivasan."

You too may have noticed the sudden influx of your friends and family in India on Facebook. It looks like the love affair with Orkut is over and considering I've never been really active on Orkut and was on Facebook ever since it was only open to college students in the U.S., I love it. It saves me from checking hajjar networks to keep tabs on people I no longer am in touch with. Since I use my real name on Facebook and even have my ex-professors on my friends list, I'm extremely careful about what I post and whom I add as friends.

But my parents are still not on Facebook and I doubt they will ever be although my mother-in-law is and she refuses to add us to her friends list, which I assume I should be happy about. Facebook can be a privacy nightmare if you don't know your way around its perennially changing settings. but thanks to the hullaballoo of its now-500 million members, it is much better now.

"To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet."

"Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed."

"The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another's business is practically a birthright. "

The furor was kicked off by comments from Anamitra Banerji, the head of product management and monetization at Twitter, who told MediaPost.com that “We are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.” He declined to give an exact date on when the micro-blogging site would launch an ad platform

"What's especially scary is that even if you are careful about broadcasting your location, your "friends" can still screw up your security. We'll explain below, and throw out some other important "Don'ts" for this latest social networking technology to finally reach your most annoying buddies:"

"Google Buzz: revolution, evolution, or devolution? Many of you have asked me for my take. So here's how it stacks up against my five next-generation product & service design principles — the principles of "design for meaning.""

"Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009."

Feeling overwhelmed by the bevy of social networking services? Google wants to help — by adding one to the list. On Tuesday the company unveiled Google Buzz, another way for people to tell other people what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.

I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

The paper describes the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content — and the new “Village” paradigm of social search — in which answers arise in conversation with the people in your network.

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

I want to know what Dr. King would make of Twitter, the insistent social-media service that asks its users to describe “What’s happening?” in 140 characters or less.

Though forthcoming, my friend was anxious to preserve her anonymity; Facebook employees, after all, know better than most the value of privacy. As she is not permitted to divulge company secrets, and would like to remain employed, her name has been omitted from this interview. It provides an interesting snapshot of the inner workings and culture of Facebook in the summer of 2009.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup

The beauty of Facebook’s many features is that now you can choose what you show and to what type of people. By using friend lists and playing with your privacy settings, you can create different views for each segment of your life.

I am @twitlookup a lookup robot for twitter. using me you can lookup dictionary definitions, weather and ipl cricket scores. tell your friends on twitter about me.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year

Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven "flashmob" mimicking an advertisement for a phone company.

In 2009, Twitter will become much more tightly integrated with the rest of the blog in a variety of ways - watch out for tweetbacks and tweetstats to make their debut, and tweet comments to TwitterRolls to start appearing on blogs. Here are 10 ways Twitter will impact blogs this year.

Firefox is not social networking ready but can be easily converted into a social networking hub by using extensions and add-ons. Flock-ofy FireFox

When you find yourself arrested in a foreign country that may not offer you contact with the outside world, send a tweet out before you get taken down.

One popular subscriber has put his Twitter account up for sale on eBay, prompting a fiery debate over ethics and commerce online

Twubble can help expand your Twitter bubble—it searches your friend graph and picks out people who you may like to follow.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Tuesday ordered the Special Task Force of the state police to probe the creation of a profile in her name on the popular social networking site Orkut.

It is important to keep in mind certain principles of etiquette when using the social networking service. And more importantly, don't get killed.

high schoolers, old dudes and your Mom can't join.

A team of UK researchers is combining the power of social network Facebook with communications tool Bluetooth to learn more about human interactions.

Facebook is, by nature, far more interactive, and given that many personal blogs are aimed at people the writer knows, it’s hardly surprising that the social networking site is winning.

Some are stellar and some are stinkers

"I don’t want to build a social networking site. I just want to use one."

If you haven't already noticed, Facebooks lets you add external apps. Some are quite cool. But is it getting saturated already?