By Sherri L. Smith, BlackWeb20.com

Last week rapper Kid Cudi came to the fork in the road and went straight, deciding to put the kibosh on both his Twitter feed and blog. Despite the recent celebrity stampede to social networking, Cudi told Rap-Up.com, “I hate the fact that you can have on one device about eight different ways for someone to contact you. If you think about it, it’s kinda creepy.”

Some people might look at the 25-year-old up and coming emcee as an out of touch technophobe, but he may have a point. With more and more social networking platforms launching, trying to be the next Twitter or Facebook, the market is getting overcrowded. I am personally signed up to at least nine social networking sites, and that’s not counting my multiple emails and instant messaging services. Some are for personal uses and some have more professional uses, but it can still be a little overwhelming. At the end of the day, with all the status updates, tweets, photos, and blog posts, there’s a decent amount of information out there for those that care to follow. But it can get to a point where it’s just too much.

Did anyone really need to know about Diddy’s tantric sex or care about Fabolous’ twitter beef with T-Pain and…Bow Wow (Yo Fab, you’re better than that for real!)?? When the NFL and the U.S. Open have to put rules in place to deal with athletes and coaches suffering from diarrhea of the mouth, Houston, we have a serious problem. And instead of paring down to one or two main forms of sharing, we sign up for aggregator sites like FriendFeed to stream all our digital jewels into a narcissistic monument into how awesome and smart we like to think we are for friends, haters, and frenemies to wring their hands over in awe or disgust.

While technology is all about progress and celebs and regular folks alike have adopted social networking as an acceptable form of human interaction I say everything in moderation. I cop to being a twitterholic. I also cop to being a raging egomaniac if given the opportunity (ask my friends and family) as well as a huge gadget lover, most notably shiny, new cell phones. But I think I have to roll with Cudi on this one.

“…[W]hat did they do before there were cell phones? Use a pay phone or write a letter. Or you catch ‘em at the crib….I think I want to take it back to that. Sometimes it just shouldn’t be that easy for you to get in contact with me.”

BlackWeb20.com covers website and application launches; culturally relevant Internet industry news; and mainstream Internet industry news from an African-American perspective.  They also analyze emerging web trends and how they apply to web properties that target African-Americans or African-American culture.

New York man is charged with a hate crime

Buffalo, N.Y., Police say that the thought of Whites and Hispanics living in the same household was too much for 40-year-old Donald Napierala to take, so he took a seven-foot cross, wrapped it in gasoline-soaked rags and lit it on their front lawn. The fire caused about $250 in damage, but it could have been worse, says Officer James T. Reese and Fire Marshals Edwin Ortiz and Harold Emerson, noting that his actions could very well have killed the four people who slept inside during his 1:30 a.m. escapade. His charges include arson, reckless endangerment, and criminal mischief. He is also charged with perpetrating a hate crime.