Character

April 22, 2009 —

Twitter is fast becoming home to people using the service for vastly different reasons than I. I’ve no issue with it. I followed Tony Hawk for a day.

But the recent celebrity rush on top of the media nods has given twitter the kind of credibility that can suck in the unwilling. So we get these official accounts for celebrities and politicians keeping us up to date by way of a savvy intern.

Like U.S. Senator John Thune, Republican, South Dakota, whose account gave us the following blip earlier tonight:

Introduced bill to require admin to pay down debt using $ repaid by TARP recipients. Hope to prevent Pres from creating rolling slush fund.

I look at this and think: who wrote this? Was it the Senator himself or the savvy intern who convinced him of twitter’s credibility.

I’m going with the latter. I saw those twitpics last week. Noobs in suits don’t twitpic the first day they’re on twitter. Interns do. And you just let your ghostwriter define you in terms of that intangible event you hope to prevent when you’d have defined yourself in terms of what you actually do.

My point is this: do it yourself. Be genuine. You might be able to find a ghostwriter who understands or even shares your political views, but you’re going to struggle finding someone who shares your character.

As luck would have it, twitter has a million examples of genuine participants, beginning with Shaq and ending with the guy twittering with no regard to whether or not you know his full name.

So, apologies to all for the offstage lecture. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it’s announced that Mr. Thune will be attending the next twitter meetup. Maybe we’ll get new evidence. Maybe I’ll argue that ghostwriters have initials that can be typed in for the fake stuff.

We’ll see.

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You’re doing it wrong

October 6, 2008 —

Deane called me out yesterday on my use of twitter. His post, entitled Kingdom of the Non Sequitur, railed against the frequency of the inside joke (on twitter).

Being new to twitter, Deane is still concerned with how best to use the service. When he looks back at each tweet, he’d like to be able to say, “yep, that’s a complete, cogent thought. It’s a mini blog post.” Here’s a great example of one such tweet:

Male lion + female tiger = a liger. They’re much larger than either parent. Female lion + male tiger = a tigon. They’re much smaller.

This is definitely a mini blog post. And an interesting one at that. I had no idea there were enough of these in the world to establish an expectation for size.

But Twitter doesn’t ask for anything more than an answer to the question: What are you doing?

So, in this regard, learning about the non-magical characteristics of ligers and tigons really doesn’t give any clues as to what Deane is up to. Granted, Deane is tweeting as @gadgetopia, which also happens to be the name of his blog. And If I had to guess what Gadgetopia was up to at any given time, I’d say mini blog posts.

But I tweet as myself, and sometimes I’m just not very concerned with cogency. As in the tweet he points to as an example of an inside joke:

Has anyone seen @brianoberkirch’s dongle?

For what it’s worth, this just happened to be what I was thinking at the time. Actually, the full tweet was intended to go like this:

Has anyone seen @brianoberkirch’s dongle? Also, why does this remind me of the song Detachable Penis?

But I accidentally posted half the tweet when I bounced to Google to confirm the name of the band.

Back to the point. I use twitter to (1) post what I’m doing, (2) post what I’m thinking, (3) ask a question, or (4) respond to something somebody else is (4a) doing, (4b) thinking, or (4c) asking. My twitter account really doesn’t represent anything more profound.

So, even though I’m probably not always thoughtful enough to hold back an inside joke, this just happened to be what I was thinking at the time.

I hope this helps, Deane. Be sure to let me know in the comments if you found this:
(a) extremely helpful
(b) kind of helpful
(c) not really that helpful

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Talking to strangers

May 24, 2008 —

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.

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