Increasing the flow to catch up

I haven just joined twitter and completed the 'things to do' that were attached to this week. As well as following a couple of colleagues I decided to follow a crime writer and found his tweets very interesting! Only thing that I didn't do was set up some privacy options as I created the account on an app downloaded to my iPad and the screen was different to the instructions shown. Found the web version better until i got to know what i was doing. Only thing is that I can now see all the tweets posted by people in my neighbourhood even though I did not tell them where I lived! Looks like you don't have to put your details in for them to know who and where you are. Also added a twitter gadget to my igoogle page for easy access but as yet not sure how this works.
Had a look at the facebook pages of the our library and other institutions as well. I can see how they can be of use to get a news item across to lots of people. Don't think I will be joining though.