You wake up in Austin. You check into brightkite. You wake up in San Francisco. You check into brightkite.
Now that being social means plotting your location, the issue of oversharing is top of mind again.
It’s not the idea of fellow geeks knowing where I’m at any given time that makes me uncomfortable. I have no problem with brightkite, and I love the idea of you knowing when I’m in ur town so long as I’ve authorized you.
But I check in to public timelines as well. And in those cases, anyone can see where I’m at. As a single person, the concern wouldn’t even occur to me. But family changes this, and lately I’m wondering how much to reveal. (Like whether I’m out of town.)
To put a finer point on it, I’m wondering how much to reveal on Twitter since it’s the one communication app I use that doesn’t allow privacy differentiation within a stream.
I understand Twitter has immediate issues to deal with, but privacy should be high on the list of concerns. Right now it’s not being handled with any amount of sophistication.
I don’t mean to complain about Twitter. The issue is more mine than theirs. And, fwiw, I love the service.
There’s a simple solution, though. Allow members to post private tweets by preceding them with a p. e.g., p You wake up in Vegas.
Those private tweets would only be seen by the people you trust most. I know that everyone follows and follows back to widely varying degrees, but, for anyone using the service, the segment of friends you trust most would be reciprocal followers (i.e., those you follow who also follow you back.)
I have about 150 friends in this category. And even though I don’t really know them all well, I’d trust them to know that I’m out of town or where I’m staying or, maybe, what my family is up to.
I think we got caught up in the excitement of lifestreaming and forgot to really think about who might be following those streams. Maybe some of those people are crazies.