SUNY Online Teaching Community Resources

Microblogging then allows us to not only enrich our most intimate social connections but also the less-intimate “weak ties”–the guy you met at a conference, the group of Australians you met at a hostel last summer in Europe, the girl who sat next to you in high school English–those people who, until the advent of microblogging, most of us would have lost touch with. It is this extended, “meaningful” socialization with many people, made possible for the first time by Facebook’s inclusion of its Newsfeed feature into the interface, that catapulted the platform from online social activity website popular amongst students and backpackers into its current incarnation, “de facto public commons”.