Hey everyone, look at what I’m doing now…and now…and now…

Hold on just a sec, I have to Tweet to the world what I’m up to…

@jeffhilimire: Working on a blog post about status’ing…

Ok, good, now that I’ve taken care of that, lately I’ve been struck by this new time that we live in, where telling the world what you’re doing at any point in time is commonplace.  True, the ability to status is nothing new.  Many of us used AIM for this purpose way, waaayyy back when it burst onto the scene.  But Facebook and Twitter have taken it to a new level in the last six months.

@jeffhilimire: Just read through this post by @fredwilson on status’ing, for ideas… http://bit.ly/NUZ49

Fred Wilson (if you don’t subscribe to his blog, you need to: http://www.avc.com) states it perfectly when he writes, “Status is universal. Not everyone takes photos or videos, or plays games. But everyone has a status and it changes.”  Even Facebook admitted to the world the importance of status’ing when they redesigned their layout to look strikingly similar to the king of all status’ing sites: Twitter.  So the question is, are we entering a world where everyone is narcissistic enough to think the world needs to know what they are doing, all the time?

@jeffhilimire: Did I just call myself narcissistic?

But the reality is, this is the direction the world is headed, because this is what the young folks are doing.  Personally, I don’t do much status updating on Facebook or Twitter.  And when I see someone who tweets, “headed to the gym”, “eating a bagel”, etc., I have to consider if I should really be following that person.

@jeffhilimire: No offense @aplusk.

The good folks at Forrester have a great report entitled, “Building Gen Y’s Multichannel Media Profile“, and as you can probably guess, Gen Y’ers spend double the amount of their day on social networking sites, updating their statuses constantly, than do their older counterparts.  And as every social site out there seems to be allowing their users to update their status (LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.), this trend is only going to grow.

@jeffhilimire: Taking a drink of coffee. Thinking when I was younger, I didn’t need so much coffee.

But I do think I should point out, people who think Twitter is only about status updates are way off.  In fact, I think the fact that Twitter still has the “What are you doing?” title above the tweet text box is only confusing people.

So will status’ing continue to grow?  Surely.  Will anyone be listening?  THAT’S the question.