Donning the Twitter Condom
January 10th, 2008So, thanks to [excised to adhere to Twitter privacy norms] announcement that he was going private and protecting his updates so they can only be seen by followers, my Twit-stream is now punctuated by a river of new red padlocks.
I understand the motivation– in fact I’ve been expecting this for a while given the strong implicit desire amongst info-oriented Twitterers (most of those I follow) for private group capabilities of some kind– but I don’t really agree with it.
My feeling is that leaving Tweets opens actively facilitates people finding me, the network effect of which is allowing me to potentially follow them. Most of the people I follow, beyond the small initial core group I already “knew,” are people I discovered by seeing references to them in my friends’ conversation. Typically I would then go to the unknown person’s Twitstream and read a few pages to see if they are someone I want to follow. Others come from people who find me and I, again, look at their Twits to see if I should follow them. I don’t follow everyone who follows me.
[also excised due to Twitter padlock] notes that he doesn’t care about discoverability… he wants “conversation. conversation is easier in a pub than a stadium.” True, but in Twitter we control the door anyway– we don’t have to follow everyone who discovers us, so the amount of conversation remains manageable. I put a high premium on allowing people to easily discover those they want to follow rather than having to follow them first. They can sit at the table– doesn’t mean I am listening to them.
[yet another Twitterer I can't name] says she doesn’t see any problem because “If I see people having an interesting conversation with someone, I’ll look and add that person, and vice versa.” Well, sure… but it adds another step to the process that seems unnecessary to me. Having to wait for an approval to see Tweets to make a decision whether I want to see those Tweets…
Again, I think of Twitter as a group conversation at a conference. It isn’t my dinner table and it isn’t Wembley stadium… so people can come and sit in and listen and, if they want to, they can listen to me. They don’t have to touch me on the shoulder so they can hear what I am saying. When I go to someone’s Twitter profile who is new to me, I am evaluating whether I want to follow them. I am much less likely to add someone just to see if I want to add them (so to speak).
As I told [excised #2], to each their own. I don’t make my blog private either. I know only a few people read it, but I want more people to. I know that my content can (and does) find its way elsewhere in references akin to Twitter badges, but that’s just another act of sharing… and given my way I’ll share people to their death.
This also closes the ecosystem even more and unless I have a very strong reason to, I opt for keeping things open. I do understand why people opt for protected updates. It’s too bad Twitter doesn’t allow for granular control (public and private Tweets) because the option to privatize information makes all of that information unavailable to other interesting and potentially useful applications leveraging social networks, such as Tweet Scan. A nice system with an open API is a sad thing without data to access!
Talking to myself: the role of lurkers in communities is interesting and this brings that to light. Maybe some of those people I don’t know and who don’t know me who follow me silently will make an important connection for me someday.
Also, different peoples’ approaches to community management are fascinating. I met someone a few days ago who manipulates their flickr contact list every day, promoting, demoting and removing contacts all the time. I’m the opposite– I have to find a reason to make those changes. A number of people following me are those people who are trying to amass thousands of contacts. I should block them, but in the end why bother?
There’s more than one person in my top20 who I discovered through incredibly serendipitous routes that people would never suspect are actually useful… such as a random find on a Twittervision map.
Not to mention those gray area apps like: Tweeterboard and the truly useful things like Tweet Scan…
Ah, the webs we weave whether or not we choose to deceive…
[...] This post is in response to Chris’ Twitter Condom post. [...]
As I mentioned at the time, in my own case it wasn’t so much the viewability *within* twitter that bothered me as how the twitter “badges” (widgets) were causing my tweets to get spewed around the net on people’s blogs who I don’t read and don’t follow in twitter, simply because they “followed” me. That was what caused me to go private. I totally understand that when I was tweeting in public I was relying on security through obscurity, and that even now it’s not particularly secure or private; but for me it’s a question of “private enough” and “obscure enough” - I’m obviosuly wanting to reveal things to people and converse otherwise I wouldn’t post them at all - but that doesn’t mean I want them to rise to the top of a google search. The twitter badges were what shatterd the “enough” part for me.
I think there’s plenty right with controlling one’s output or intake of information. I like Twitter so much because it is somewhere in-between blogging and chatting/instant messaging. What’s cool is to watch it evolve. I remember at one point Scott bemoaned folks who were using Twitter as a chat board (I’m sure that was me, but then again, so was everyone else on his following list). And now people are wondering how it is used, how it should be used, and even <a href=”http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html”?if it is just too good.
I am still skeptical of the twit(ter) to start with. Not only is it not the best implementation I have seen (API mushups often require sharing your password with third parties) but at the end of the day I do not control the content once typed. Someone else ones the storage.
If this were implemented as size limited XML feeds in bound and out this would be another story.
Having someone else control your content is true of almost every social web service– you are using their app. You can, of course, keep an archive of your data with Twitter (as I and many others do) just a you should with flickr, del.icio.us and others.
The technology behind Twitter isn’t of particular interest to me… nor is it relevant to what I was talking about, which is the way people and communities USE Twitter. Users could care less what language and formats are being used, it is the functionality they care about. And Twitter clearly scratches an itch.
[...] to the discussions surrounding the value of Twitter, for folks like Alan Levine, D’Arcy Norman, Chris Lott (I wear my protection with pride, Chris!), and many others have done a far better job than I ever [...]
Good post. You make some great points that most people do not fully understand.
“I understand the motivation– in fact I’ve been expecting this for a while given the strong implicit desire amongst info-oriented Twitterers (most of those I follow) for private group capabilities of some kind– but I don’t really agree with it.”
I like how you explained that. Very helpful. Thanks.
[...] that I don’t know. Of course, if I protected my updates that would be different. But on that, my position hasn’t really changed: I don’t see that locking provides enough benefit to outweigh the [...]