If you haven’t heard of Portfolio, you’re not alone. Administrators continue to push Portfolio despite significant apprehension by undergraduates over adopting the website instead of more established social networks that can promote their student groups.

Olin Library is hosting a series of free workshops this fall that will teach students, faculty and staff how to use Twitter effectively. The four sessions, led by Washington University subject librarians, will cover the basics of Twitter, including ways to use the social network to promote causes and movements, share photography and form professional connections.

Recently, 22-year-old Ilya Zhitomirskiy died. He was a New York University dropout, and was one of four co-founders of the social network Diaspora*. His death sent minor reverberations around the Internet; it made the front pages of various tech blogs as well as Gawker and Yahoo.

Google’s efforts to expand the usage of its new social networking site, Google Plus on college campuses do not seem to have found much success among students at Washington University. Many University students have elected not to start Google Plus accounts, or simply do not use them.

Imagine you went out with your friends last weekend and you had a fun night. This is college, so there was drinking and partying, and there were photographs to document the adventure. Your friend who took the photos, through no fault of his own, took a particularly incriminating photograph of you and put it on Facebook.

Social networking has no doubt changed the way college students interact. Information is shared more frequently, relationships are easier to sustain and knowledge is spread at unprecedented speeds. From sharing photos to dating, social networking sites have transformed cultural norms that were once taken for granted.

The New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced that the 2009 Word of the Year is “unfriend,” meaning “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site.” But immediately after this new word was unveiled, loyal Facebook users stormed Internet forums, many of them arguing that “defriend” is the more appropriate verb.

Ever feel like you’re being watched? Recently, I watched a video on YouTube that I made 6 years ago with my friends from middle school. More interestingly, there were comments and responses from random people about our video (which I did not know was posted online). And last week, my mom told me about a Diwali show in University of Michigan for which some kids watched my previous Diwali performance on YouTube and performed it exactly the way I did. I felt both proud and creeped out, realizing that other people can have access to parts of my life that I sometimes don’t realize are public.

For those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, Twitter is a social networking forum that allows people to set up micro-blogs and track each other as they go about their lives.

You don’t have to watch “Gossip Girl” in order to know the damaging social prospects of gossip Web sites and the lengths people will go to avoid having negative information […]