In case you haven’t noticed, social networking has become pretty popular on the Internet recently.

A couple of years ago, it was Myspace making the rounds — it seemed everyone had a Myspace account. Then Facebook popped up, and most recently we’ve all been bombarded with Twitter.

I know many people wrote these off as fads, but I think it’s safe to say that they’ve outlived the fad stage. Especially Twitter and Facebook.

Both of these services have their own specific advantages. Facebook is nice for keeping in touch with friends and other people that you know. A lot of people, myself included, protect their Facebook feeds so only their friends can view them.

Twitter, on the other hand, is meant to be used in a more open and public manner. If you have a Twitter account, and you have your privacy settings turned on, you aren’t getting the full experience of this service.

One of the joys of Twitter is the ability to search any term and instantly find out what other people are saying about that particular topic. People also frequently use hashtags, which consist of a number sign followed by a word, to tag specific terms. During any major event, you can search for the hashtag to see what people are saying.

The Super Bowl had it’s own hashtag (#sb44), as did discussion of the tsunami that was expected to hit Hawaii this past weekend (#hitsunami).

You can also search words that aren’t hashtags. For example, if I type “Ogemaw” into the search field on my Twitter account, I will find any post, or tweet, that contains the word Ogemaw.

Because of the popularity of Twitter, we here at the Ogemaw County Herald, the Oscoda County Herald, and the Arenac County Independent, have been running our own accounts for the past several months. Maybe you follow us. If you don’t, be sure to check out our feeds.

The Ogemaw County Herald’s Twitter feed can be found at www.twitter.com/

ogemawherald. The Oscoda County Herald’s Twitter feed is at www.twitter.

com/oscodaherald, and the Arenac County Independent can be found at www.twitter.com/arenacindy.

We use our Twitter accounts in a couple of different ways. First, any story that is posted in our news, opinion, or sports sections has a link automatically posted to our Twitter feed. If your account is set up to send you notifications when you have new posts in your feed, when following us, you will be notified whenever news breaks, and whenever something new is posted to our sites.

We also post things to our Twitter accounts that don’t go on the Web sites. These include random observations while we are covering news and events around the county, information on where we are heading, and a little glimpse into our days here at the newspaper.

Finally, we want to use our Twitter accounts to interact with you, our readers. We monitor our accounts frequently throughout the day, so feel free to send us a message. If you have a news tip, send us a tweet. If you have a question, tweet us. Want to tell us we did a good job? Send it to us on Twitter. Or if we messed something up, feel free to let us know that as well.

To send a message to one of our publications on Twitter, just type the “@” symbol before our name and send us a message (@ogemawherald, @oscodaherald, @arenacindy).

We are community newspapers, and Twitter gives us just one more opportunity to interact with our community online. We will also be adding Facebook accounts for each of our publications in the very near future, so keep an eye out for those as well.