I do it, and I know you do it, too - you read the myriad of news and status updates on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes you read a few, sometimes you read each one that seems to pop up. I tend to read most updates on my Blackberry when I'm on the shuttle, on the toilet, on Bart, etc.

I've noticed a trend in these updates, especially between Facebook and Twitter. I have graphed the following from a random sample of some of the updates I get from Facebook:

On Facebook I have around 700 friends and I do realize that not all of those 700 friends' updates show up on my Home page. On Twitter, I follow around 55 accounts. I have greatly 'trimmed the fat' on people I follow on Twitter. I'm just currently interested in those 55 accounts, so no offense to those who I don't follow back. I like to keep my feed clean, and although the new feature of 'Lists' was created to help people like me cope with it, I still find it unneccessary. The 30 of those accounts are of friends I'd want to follow and around 25 are news aggregators, blogs, and companies that I find of interest.

In the first chart, you can see how Facebook statuses tend to lean toward self-absorbed, personal updates. It would be backwards to hide certain friends' updates from my entire feed for some statuses that I felt unneccessary to read only to realize that I'd be missing out on their important updates in the future. I have a Facebook to keep up with people. Facebook is far more personal than Twitter - it literally is your face in a book-like fashion, where people can look at pictures of you and look through your tabs and pages of friends, information, etc.

Twitter on the other hand is very public. Even if you have a protected account, you never know who may be seeing your tweets. Tweets seem to be more informative and wit-oriented. Everyone seems to be a comedian or philosopher on Twitter - and I like that. Facebook on the other hand, seems to motivate people to parade themselves, causing them to put up updates of self-achievement and self-absorption for all to see. These are the kinds of updates that I see almost every day - and mostly by the same amount of people.

Let me reiterate to say that these findings are from my own collection of friends. For you, it may seem to be different. Some people might be thinking,"Why don't you just delete your Facebook or Twitter, then?" Well, that would defeat the purpose of staying in touch with people and the world, and I do want to stay in touch with every single one of you, but I can do without the mundane, useless updates. My conclusion is this: Would you tweet or update something you wouldn't want your boss to see? Your mom? Your girlfriend? Yourself a couple years from now?

Let's tone it down a bit, everyone is on some sort of cash grind and everyone suffers with school. Everyone is at the gym and everyone knows you're the coolest one at the party. Let's become bigger and actually do more than what we have to say - or at the very least, update.