Not so much with the BASIC analogy. You're just witnessing the conversion of meatspace to cyberspace. When phones became cheap enough, teenage girls started (stereotypically, at least) talking about "nothing" on them all the time. (I'm sure boys did something similar, but nothing on personal media springs to mind.) One difference now is that people do it in public. But they also have since cell phones became cheap enough. We've all been next to people whose entire half of the conversation we were subjected to. I do Twitter, though I don't do much with my Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. Twitter allows me to read that a colleague at UC Irvine is getting new lab furniture and to ask her where she's getting it from. And her to tell me where, and end of conversation. Just like we were sitting two cubicles away. Some of the Facebook and MySpace stuff is the same but asynchronous (as IM and Twitter can be, too). It's almost the equivalent of the whiteboard on your college room door. (In fact, the experience is probably intentionally similar.)

The programming analogy might be more that everyone's first program in a new language is "Hello, World!".

It's like people who greet each other with "Yo" or "How you doin'?" Yo doesn't add anything, and how you doin doesn't mean they want to know. It's a ritual call and response. Trip is right, those same meatspace communication routines are bleeding into cyberspace except that facebook and twitter are more informative.