David Emery OnlineOptional Privacy Invasion
23 November 2006
The latest “fad” circulating round the internet is Twitter. The site itself is pretty simple – you send short little messages to the site, which then appear on the site and get sent to all you friends. It works quite nicely as something between IRC, MySpace messaging, a forum and IM.
It’s yet another optional break down in privacy; you can choose to make your twitters private, but I’m not sure if anyone does, and pretty much everybody using it charts the majority of the minutiae of their life. You can see what people have for breakfast, when they get to work, whether they’re doing work or messing round on the internet – the works.
Yes, it can be incredibly boring – I’m sure most people reading could think of nothing worse.
However, when it’s people in your social group, it suddenly becomes interesting – how many times have you discussed this sort of thing with your friends? Every day, I’ll bet.
I’m still toying with adding my Twitter feed to the sidebar of this site, but interestingly I think it’s slightly too informal for the set up I have at the moment:
The slant I go for here is something hopefully slightly more formal and informational, whereas Twitter is quite obviously utterly informal – I’m not sure if the two really go together. Alternatively, I may be over analysing the whole thing far too much…
I’m very interested in what commercial possibilities Twitter has, however – I think if I could get a band interested in doing it that could have a lot of possibilities; it would enable a real connection between a band and it’s audience, and due to Twitters mobile phone interface (you can use it via sms, IM or on the web) I could see and band using it on the road, where even MySpace can be in accessible.
It certainly opens up a lot of interesting possibilities…