While Doonesbury's Roland Hedley uses Twitter to spread personal nonsense, groups of students are finding practical uses for online social networking tools. Case in point: Cornell Abroad, which needs to keep in touch with students studying all over the globe while its outreach team runs activities on campus to recruit travel-minded students.

• Cornell Abroad uses the free online service Wiggio to schedule events and send out e-mail reminders, as well as inform participants about other events of mutual interest. It also provides online file storage. Wiggio was co-founded by Lance Polivy '08 and Dana Lampert '08 while they were undergraduates and has users at 140 schools.
• Picasa allows Cornell Abroad to place a slide show in cyberspace, replacing flash drives being passed from student to student for use in class presentations and tabling.
• Some old tools are still as useful as ever. The group maintains an e-mail list to inform potential recruits about events, and a smaller list used by the outreach team to communicate internally.
• There is, of course, a Facebook fan page where students can communicate with Cornell Abroad, ask questions on the wall, engage in a discussion about their study abroad destination and find links to other useful sites.
• Last, and perhaps best, students studying abroad report regularly on Cornell Abroad's blog pages. Look them up at http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/cuabroad/.