William F. Garrity

Fast Company's Ellen Gibson put together a slide show of "The Web's 10 Weirdest Social Networks." 

HAMSTERster--a Friendster for hamsters?  Lost Zombies--for friends of the undead?  And, Myrl--an online community for Second Life and Google Lively avatars?  (How existential is that?) 

Luis Suarez writes in today's The New York Times how he's using email less and other forms of messaging, more. 

I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip

By LUIS SUAREZ

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction.

I never gave up my work e-mail address, because I still need it for some work-related activities — for example, for one-on-one discussions that are too private and confidential to discuss publicly.

I was in a good position to give up most of my other e-mail because I’m a “social computing evangelist” for I.B.M. and have used social software tools for years to collaborate on projects and to share knowledge. I live in the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain and report to managers in the United States and the Netherlands. Between time differences and participation in various projects, it’s important that I spend my time efficiently.

I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I’ve been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions — maybe they will have a better idea than mine.

I started this experiment by announcing my intention on a couple of blogs, like my personal one and blogs inside I.B.M.’s firewall. The postings in response were overwhelmingly positive — but I also encountered some skepticism. Many people wondered how I would manage to communicate and collaborate with my peers without using e-mail.

... 

From one of the Microsoft bulletins: Christopher Elliott writes about handling email on a wireless device. 

If you’re sending to someone on a wireless device 

• Consider sending the message later, when someone is at his or her PC. 
• Write headlines like you're texting. 
• Be concise, but don’t oversimplify. 
• Follow up politely and promptly. 

If you’re sending from a mobile device 

• Don't compose and converse at the same time. 
• Take your time—or better yet, wait. 
• Don't keep the device on 24/7. 
• Mind your Ps and Qs. 

See the link for the full text. 

I am!  See this post by Jackie Huba in the wonderful Church of the Customer blog: 

Are you hyperconnected?

Do you read email on your PDA before you get out of bed?

Do you Twitter in the bathroom?

Do you update your Facebook profile while IM'ing and talking on the phone?

If this sounds like you, you're probably part of the hyperconnected culture, where multi-tasking communication is the norm. The power switch is always on.

An IDC/Nortel study of some 2,400 people in 17 countries found that 16 percent of respondents are already hyperconnected, embracing a world of multiple devices and intense use of communication applications.

Companies will have to adapt to the growing number of hyperconnected employees whose work and personal lives are blurred together by all of those devices and applications, not to mention customers who'll want to communicate with companies the same way.

Are you hyperconnected? The magic number for devices is seven. That's seven devices for work or personal use while using at least nine applications like IM, text messaging, web conferencing and social networks.

I didn't think I was hyperconnected until I listed my devices and applications.

My devices

1. Macbook Pro
2. iPhone
3. Landline phone
4. Nuvi GPS system (in car)
5. DirecTV
6. iPod Shuffle
7. Remote webcam

Applications

1. Firefox
2. Entourage
3. iPhone text messaging
4. Yahoo Messenger
5. Skype VoiP
6. Skype video conferencing
7. Facebook
8. Twitter
9. SWOM
10. Church of the Customer blog
11. BlipTV
12. Flickr
13. YouTube

Are you hyperconnected and if so, is this a good thing or a bad thing for your overall mental health?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, collaborated on "Writing, Technology and Teens," a report about the relationship between formal and "informal" writing (especially texting). 

Teenagers’ lives are filled with writing. All teens write for school, and 93% of teens say they write for their own pleasure. Most notably, the vast majority of teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. Parents believe that their children write more as teens than they did at that age.

This raises a major question: What, if anything, connects the formal writing teens do and the informal e-communication they exchange on digital screens? A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought – the sentence.” They are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts. Others wonder if this return to text-driven communication is instead inspiring new appreciation for writing among teens.

While the debate about the relationship between e-communication and formal writing is on-going, few have systematically talked to teens to see what they have to say about the state of writing in their lives. Responding to this information gap, the Pew Internet & American Life Project and National Commission on Writing conducted a national telephone survey and focus groups to see what teens and their parents say about the role and impact of technological writing on both in-school and out-of-school writing. The report that follows looks at teens’ basic definition of writing, explores the various kinds of writing they do, seeks their assessment about what impact e-communication has on their writing, and probes for their guidance about how writing instruction might be improved.

At the core, the digital age presents a paradox. Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.

At the same time that teens disassociate e-communication with “writing,” they also strongly believe that good writing is a critical skill to achieving success – and their parents agree. Moreover, teens are filled with insights and critiques of the current state of writing instruction as well as ideas about how to make in-school writing instruction better and more useful.

Here is an April 25, 2008, article in Inside Higher Ed. 

The finding that 38 percent of high-school-age students have used abbreviations like “LOL” in school assignments — with 25 percent admitting to having slipped in an emoticon or two — sounds like enough to make the typical English instructor dread the next incoming freshman class. After all, according to a report released on Thursday, half of those teenagers “sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation” in essays and other school assignments.

It’s a finding that might prompt some to ask, as the report did: “What, if anything, connects the formal writing teens do and the informal e-communication they exchange on digital screens?”

Is there a steady decline of writing ability at the hands of technology? Or do new media and online communications actually encourage students to write more, providing an opening for educators to focus on boosting their composition and critical thinking skills?

The report, from the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the College Board’s National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools and Colleges, leaves open the latter as a possibility even as it calls for more research on how technology can best be marshaled in the writing classroom.

Here's a New York Times account, also from April 25. 

As e-mail messages, text messages and social network postings become nearly ubiquitous in the lives of teenagers, the informality of electronic communications is seeping into their schoolwork, a new study says.

Nearly two-thirds of 700 students surveyed said their e-communication style sometimes bled into school assignments, according to the study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing. About half said they sometimes omitted proper punctuation and capitalization in schoolwork. A quarter said they had used emoticons like smiley faces. About a third said they had used text shortcuts like “LOL” for “laugh out loud.”

“I think this is not a worrying issue at all,” said Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve the teaching of writing.