For the past five years or so, social networking sites have become a prominent part of people’s lives. MySpace and Facebook have been popular for awhile now, and these are good ways of staying in touch or reconnecting with friends.

Now we have the latest social networking site: Twitter. Unlike MySpace and Facebook, Twitter is very simple. You can update your status at any time to let people know what you’re doing. Another feature of the site allows users to directly reply to someone else’s status.

The concept is a good idea, but if people abuse it by making posts about what they’re doing every 10 minutes, it defeats the purpose.

At what point does it become too much? I can understand if someone wants to let people know about significant things that are happening in their life, but do we really need to know what someone ordered at Starbucks?

With Twitter, you can choose to follow people – be it friends, organizations or even athletes and celebrities.

One of the coolest things about Twitter is also one of its biggest flaws. There are a number of athletes and celebrities who have Twitter accounts. Phoenix Suns center Shaquille O’Neal has his own Twitter under the alias THE_REAL_SHAQ.

O’Neal interacts with fans and often posts where he is at any given time, offering tickets to the first few people that find him. That’s a good way to utilize Twitter.

However, it’s really easy to make fake accounts. There was a popular Twitter account under the user name cwalken – for actor Christopher Walken – that was known for its random, off-the-wall posts. The account was suspended when it was learned that a man in his mid-40s, who was known to make other fake celebrity accounts, was controlling it. Fake accounts damage the credibility of the site.

Another issue with the site is that it creates easy access for stalkers. Twitter allows users to block their status updates to protect privacy, but it doesn’t let them know who is viewing their account.

Michael Burckhard, sophomore business major, said Twitter has a lot to offer as a social networking tool.

“I use Twitter because it takes one of the most entertaining elements of social network sites, microblogging, and cuts the rest of the fluff,” Burckhard said. “Instead of dealing with annoying advertisements, self-indulgent photo albums and never-read surveys, I just see 140-character updates about my close friends.”

Burckhard said Twitter is the most personal of all the social networking sites.

“It’s just the user and what they have to say. No frills attached,” he said. “Considering the simplicity of Twitter, I think its prevalence will rise as socialites look for a networking site that is mobile phone friendly.”

Despite its flaws, Twitter has the potential to be the leading site for networking. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, Twitter is easy to learn. It’s more to-the-point and direct. You won’t find yourself spending hours on Twitter as opposed to the other two.

Twitter should be utilized to post significant events in people’s lives. If we can weed out the pointless fluff, such as telling everyone what time you took a shower, this idea can work. As long as people use it the way it was intended to be used, we’ll continue to see Twitter thrive.

Kyle Kershner can be reached at [email protected]