Social networking sites have of course changed the way we communicate and share information online. They allow you to be connected to people in a state of perceived intimacy, regardless of whether time is spent with said people in the "real world." It's fascinating how the little details and scraps of insight provided through status updates and the Facebook news feed can make us feel more "in touch" with a person.

It struck me that Facebook has also, in part, changed birthdays. Yesterday was my birthday. I received 50+ individual birthday well-wishes this year, mostly through Facebook. Either I've become ridiculously popular and important all of a sudden, or Facebook has made it exceedingly simple to keep track of friends' birthdays and to respond accordingly, resulting in a huge increase in birthday well-wishers. I'm inclined to believe the latter.

Birthdays are public, now. No longer are they remembered and celebrated by a close, inner-circle of friends. They, like our daily, inane status updates, have become more important in a much larger social graph.

A few months ago, I attempted to introduce my mother to Twitter. She's certainly not a technophile, she only recently learned the ins and outs of web browsing. Previously she was limited to email. I never expected her to fully embrace the offering of the service, but I thought that she might enjoy following my most recent "tweets" on her iGoogle homepage. I assumed correctly; she loved it.

She was content only in her passive use of the service, however. She would not retire her regular one-sentence emails in favor of tweets, nor was she interested in the community and social networking aspects of Twitter.

About a week after her account was created, I noticed that she was no longer following me.When I asked her about it, she reported that my tweets were no longer visible on her homepage, either. In the course of the conversation, the word Twitter jumped her memory.

"Oh, yeah! I found them (Twitter) and told them to remove me and stop harassing me," she said. Turns out she had her account removed, because there were "strangers on the Internet" wanting to follow her Twitter account. She interpreted this almost as a form of harassment. Obviously she did not understand the concept of social networking services.

I explained to her in the best way I could what Twitter was, and why being followed is not a bad thing. The Internet people were not scary stalkers (probably). Her response?

"Why in the world would those people be interested in what I have to say, and why would I want to talk to them? This whole thing is shady and creepy."

There you have it. Twitter, and social networking in general, is creepy. I do think that there is a generational gap at play, here. Not only are there misunderstandings about social web technologies among the older generations, there is a genuine feeling of fear and unease. Granted, perhaps my mother is an ext reme case, but the overall unwillingness of older people to join in on these trends cannot be denied. Although they are comfortable consuming static content on the web, producing or interacting with that content is often a strange and foreign concept.