There is no question that social networking and status updates represent a shift in the way we communicate. Ashton Kutcher just started his Twitter account 9 months ago and is approaching 4 million followers. That is 4 million people who care what Ashton Kutcher has to say or what he is doing and follow that activity via his status updates.

Combining the -- which include people like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, and Ellen DeGeneres-- there are more than 25 million people following their status updates.

It is easy to see how status updates are changing the way we stay in touch and why real-time indexing to provide users the ability to see status updates within Web search results. If you want to know what I think, I guess you should follow my Twitter account or check my Facebook status.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at .