A few years ago I read a book called "Paradox of Choice" by Barry Schwartz. The book delves into our modern life and explores how the staggering number of choices we have available to us can actually cause us to freeze up. Just think what happens in your mind while you're standing in front of the toothpaste aisle.

I think it's time for a revise on the book, this time dealing with the new world of online social interaction. Vickie Holbrook, our editor, and I keep a look out constantly few new social media applications like Facebook and Twitter. We try to keep up, and where possible, look for ways to integrate them into our newspaper. The problem is that things just move so fast. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Stumble, Diigo, Classmates, a few blogs, Meetup groups, forums, online games, and I'm looking for new ones to join all the time. Each of these is a tool to help build a social sphere of connections between people. But how do you keep it all straight? I have different interests, and different groups of people who share those interests, friends from high school and college, as well as co-workers and ex-co-workers, all of them competing for my attention. I flit from conversation to conversation, sometimes ignoring people for months before I get back to them.

Vickie and I use tools like iGoogle to help organize things. Your iGoogle page can be set up so that you keep different interests segmented on different "tabs", and there are plenty of plug-ins for the page that allow you to connect to many of the other services you subscribe to. At a glance you can see the latest headlines from your favorite bloggers, monitor the status of a few Facebook friends, or see a slideshow of your nephews Flikr feed. Another new tool has recently come out called FriendFeed, which is another way of incorporating all your various social feeds into one bucket. However, both of these tools seem to make the task even more monumental, because once you have everything up and running, with all that data pouring into one place, you can truly see how much there is to keep up on.

Where do we find the time for it? I find myself trying to squeeze in a few minutes here and there between a ridiculous work schedule and my fortunately manageable life to respond to emails, update a few statuses, play a round of Office Wars with my clique, chat live with a few old friends, and maybe if I'm lucky, make an actual connection with a person. But what I really find myself doing is losing depth in my relationships with people, rather than focusing on a few key people in my life and developing a rich, deep relationship, I instead flit from person to person, trading banalities, a joke or two, but for the most part, not really learning who they are.

So here we are with our own Paradox of Choice, do we choose to create superficial, transitory friendships, or do we instead pick one or two people and maybe sit down and talk over a latte and make a deeper connection?