Erdel Kizilkay wrote:
not too sure about this malarky myself, all this getting sent flowers etc from blokes, a bit weird.
and people have 5736281 friends, erm no you dont.
my guess is that in reality you have very few.
twitter seems even worse, shame on stephen fry for going on about it so much, load of mince.
Twitter is becoming pretty popular here in Japan. 140 characters in Japanese is more than 140 characters in the alphabet. The key in Twitter, is not a 'friends' list. It's that you 'follow' someone to see their 'Tweets'. It functions somewhat differently than friends lists on Facebook. I follow Bad Lieutenant and Kevin Spacey, but I'm not their friends. I just 'follow' those accounts on Twitter to get info that they post about their jobs, their music, whatever.
A lot of ordinary people here use it as a mini-blog; you can write things that you feel are too insignificant or short to write on your ordinary blog.
Here's a list I found on the Internet about Twitter. It's apparently a survey result from Japanese people about why they like Twitter.
You can see celebrities unmasked, in a way never seen on their blogs
There’s a lot of information circulating on Twitter you can’t find elsewhere
There may be lots of Twittering users in the same neighbourhood
You don’t have to worry about “writing” like you do on an SNS or blog
You may receive a reply from a celebrity
People you don’t even know will offer advice on problems you might have
Your followers may share new ideas which never occurred to you
Thoughtless tweets can cause huge arguments with lots of people involved
Following or being followed is an interesting system with diverse uses
The flow of information is much faster than with news sites or TV
PS- I agree with many of those reasons above.
Anyway, no one is forcing anyone to get a Twitter or Facebook account. But it's how you use those sites that counts. (On the other hand, blaming Facebook instead of the idiots who have unprotected sex with strangers is absolutely ridiculous. 
)
