Today is a day to celebrate our fathers. Those men in our lives who have helped us to become the people we are today. To my dad, Happy Fathers Day.

While looking at Twitter on my new iPad, I decided to do a quick search using the term “fathers day.” I got back three different kinds of responses.

The first was a very generic “Happy fathers day to all of the dads out there.” Fairly rarely were there people who said @ replies to their fathers. Which shows me that most fathers are not on Twitter. Now I did check on Facebook and there were a lot more direct mentions on there, but still not as many as I thought. Maybe by next year we’ll begin to see more fathers on there.

Secondly, I saw a lot of mentions on Twitter about how people wanted to wish their mothers a happy Fathers day. Now I don’t know any of these people personally, but I have to guess that their fathers are no longer in their lives for whatever reason. I’m not writing this point to focus on that, but just thinking about how much we do and how much we should share on social media about ourselves. A lot of times when writing posts on my personal Twitter account, I find myself asking myself if what I am writing for the entire world to see is something the people that are following me need to know. Remember that what you post on Twitter may be viewed by anyone who searches as well. How do you want people who don’t know you to view you?

Finally, on any Holiday, the big question is whether you’ll go out to eat or stay home for lunch. I prefer to go out to lunch, but that’s just me. There is a family that lives in my town, who’s name I will not share. They love to post pictures of their family and house on Twitter a lot. From these, I’ve been able to find out where their house is located. And also they love to post where they went for lunch and take pictures and post them while they are there. If I was, which I’m not, a thief, I would know by looking at Twitter not only where these people live, but also that right now they are not in their house right now. Now with that being said, I’ve noticed they are getting better at saying they were places and not posting the pictures until they are home, which is a good thing. Another social media tool to be careful with is location based applications like foursquare and gowalla. These apps ask you to share places you are currently in a real time basis. Which at first can be fun, but if you’re in New York on a business trip and your wife is home alone, do you really want people to know that? We need to be careful with the things we are posting on Twitter and other social network sites. As our personal friends are not the only ones who are seeing them.

Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there. Hopefully by this time next year my dad will become part of the social media world. But for now, I guess I’ll have to go old school and give him a phone call to tell him how thankful I am for him.