Oversharers.Com And How Social Networking Became TMI

Oversharers.com is a website that reposts embarrassing Twitter and Facebook updates with witty commentary. The Oversharers editorial staff reviews the best submissions from users and posts the grossest and most strangely personal updates on the internet for public embarrassment.

Do you have a friend who constantly tweets her child's potty training nightmares on Twitter? Do you have a friend who's known for asking strange medical questions via Facebook status updates? You might consider submitting one or two of their choice updates to Oversharers.

Why is Oversharers socially relevant?

Besides being funny, Oversharers is trying to tell us something about our use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. To be fair, Oversharers will also take submissions from regular blogs and stories overheard in public places. But the vast majority of material posted on Oversharers is culled from tweets and status updates.

At some point, we must have begun to feel the need to post such unnecessary details about our personal lives and bodily functions in publicly accessible places. Oversharers invites us to laugh at these TMI (too much information) posts, but also take a step back and think about how this sort of sharing became a social trend in the first place.

How did this happen?

Twitter and Facebook aren't necessarily the root of the problem. Rather, the problem is how we're taught to view Twitter and Facebook as inseparable from daily life. If you want to promote a product, it needs a Facebook page. If you want to publicize an event, you make an event page. Same goes with Twitter. If you have anything to sell or promote, it better be online 24/7.

The vast armies of tech-savvy, creative, unemployed people out there have also been taught that they must sell themselves. It's not about what you know, but who follows you on Twitter or sees your Facebook status updates. Even folks who are gainfully employed now believe that the general internet-using public must find them witty if they are going to continue to succeed. Unfortunately, our lives are not always interesting on an hour-by-hour basis. That's when we dive into the TMI-zone for material and become oversharers.

How much information is TMI?

Here are some rules to help you from becoming a victim on the Oversharers website and from embarrassing yourself in general:

1. Anything to do with pee, poop, or sex does not make a good tweet or status update.

2. If you couldn't visit your grandmother and make the same "witty" comment about your life in her presence, don't post it.

3. Don't use tweets and status updates as a primary means of communication with your friends. If you want to overshare with them, use the phone.

4. If you are even slightly in the market for a job or a promotion, all your posts should be positive-sounding and neutral in subject matter.

5. Don't rely on your Twitter or Facebook privacy settings to keep you safe. The Oversharers website reposts people's TMI tweets and updates with their user name, picture and "real" name attached. Anyone with internet access can see Oversharers, and your name might end up on a Google search for a tweet about your mysterious genital rash.