Social networking takes up precious time that could be actually used PERSONALLY interacting with people, so while you’ve got your head down reading your tweets… maybe it would be a good idea to actually make a PHONE CALL or TALK to the people around you instead.

Surprisingly Christoper “Biz” Stone, the co-founder of the popular networking site, Twitter, agrees with me and he’s urged the 500 million or so people who use the popular website to do something else with their time.

Stone said nobody shouldn’t be spending HOURS using the social networking site because it is ‘unhealthy’… and this is coming from the BAWSE!

So what should all you twitter-holics be doing instead?

Find out below…

For those of you who don’t know, Biz Stone was one of the four people who created Twitter back in 2006 and the site passed the half a billion user mark just this week .

Some users have repeatedly complained that it is incredibly addictive with many staying logged on for over 12 hours at a time.

But for those of you self-professed “twitter addicts,” Biz says that instead of tweeting every dang second, you should actually just dip in and see what people are talking about… perhaps respond to a few of your mentions and dip OUT!

Stop and do some other things besides filling up our timelines with your useless tweets every second of the day.

At a conference in Montreal, Stone, 37, said that using Twitter that much was not what he intended.

 To me, that sounds unhealthy.

I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you’ve found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something.

I think that’s a much healthier engagement.

While Stone admits that too much Twitter is unhealthy, “frequently” (however much that is) is just enough…

Obviously, we want you to come frequently.

Twitter allows users to send messages that are no longer than 140 characters long, a term dubbed as “micro blogging”.

In his speech, Stone reveals that when they first launched the site, many people thought it would fail because they did not think the idea of “micro-blogging” was useful.

Nobody thought it was a good idea.

And I distinctly remember my colleague Evan Williams saying, ‘Well, neither is ice

cream. Should we ban ice cream and all joy or can we have something that’s just fun? What’s wrong with that?’ (source)

I have to admit… I’m somewhat of a Twitter junkie myself, but I’ve tuned it down quite a bit because it CAN be addictive.

In fact, I joined twitter back in 2007 (I think) and I used to love it way more than Facebook. Nowadays, I love them both the same… (*sigh*)

Are you a “Twitter-holic” or a Facebook “Freebaser”?

How much is too much social networking?

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