When I was a kid I made friends from school and around the neighborhood and this mostly entailed face-to-face encounters. Most of my classmates knew each other's telephone numbers. And so did the neighborhood guys, but we rarely needed to phone each other because we just lived houses apart.

Those days, kids didn't have mobile phones. You'd be lucky if you had your own telephone line in your room. Social networking meant spending Friday evenings with your pals playing Nintendo. That was just 15 to 20 years ago. Imagine how it was in the time before my childhood years.

These days playing Nintendo with friends means everyone stayed at their own place, playing multi-player games with each other over the Internet. Phone calls have given way to text messaging and instant messaging. Sure we have video conferencing, but does anyone bother?

In this age of social networking, many of us have become lazy connectors and shy communicators.

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If you think back to over 23 years ago, when short messaging service (SMS) technology came to be, you might realize how impressive it is that such an old technology still exist. SMS has brought new and inspiring ideas for today’s "web 2.0" applications and services. It is this same technology which has empowered Twitter to flourish.

Right now, Twitter is becoming the talk of the web, and if you don’t believe that, just listen to any recent episode of This Week in Tech. You just can’t avoid it, and it has become a really big deal. Is it a bandwagon? Absolutely, but this one is certainly worth the effort of jumping on.

Recently, applications like FriendFeed and Plurk are trying to do what Twitter has already done. FriendFeed, at its current state, isn't going to win. I'm only following seven people, and it is far too much information to digest. If I was following 40 people, I would have already given up.

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