on twitter vs. the blog
Posted by: dnorman in general, tags: blogging, thoughts, twitter
This post is in response to Chris’ Twitter Condom post.
I’ve been on the fence regarding public or protected tweets on Twitter.com. I’ve actually toggled that switch at on at least 3 different occasions, and then reverted back to Public maybe a day later.
Public tweets are visible to the world, indexed by Google, and make it easy to nanoblog (something that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less, which might not otherwise be blogworthy). Protected tweets are private, and are visible only to those people whom you follow on Twitter. They aren’t indexed by Google, and they’re essentially part of a private conversation.
The problem is that the public/protected flag is a global setting for an account. Either all of your tweets are public or they’re all protected. There is no middle ground, or ability to change this on a per-tweet basis.
So, why set an account to be “protected”? One of the things that strikes me about Twitter is how much it feels like a conversation in a pub. It’s informal, loose, and sometimes a bit more unfiltered than would be otherwise advisable. A common type of tweet (of which I am probably more guilty than others) is the rant/vent. Bitching about meetings. Letting off some steam in little 140 character puffs. Probably not something that should be indexed by The Goog. To be really honest, probably the kind of thing that shouldn’t be online in the first place, but that’s probably another post.
If a twitter account is set to be “protected” then it becomes a bit more safe to open up a bit more (too much?). The pub conversation becomes more intimate and real.
Why set an account to be “public”? It makes it easy for people to follow you. Your social network/graph can grow without obstruction, and you will likely find new people who are doing things that interest you.
But, it’s not as simple as it sounds. I currently follow 70 people. That’s about the maximum I think I can follow. There are 318 people following me. It’s just physically impossible for me to reciprocate. Am I missing out? Possibly. But anything important will trickle through various conversations and I’ll see enough to make sense of it. And anything really important will likely exist outside of Twitter.
And I doubt anyone would really miss anything by being unable to follow my tweets. Sure, they’d miss out on some extremely witty banter, but anything important would show up in other conversations, and eventually outside of Twitter.
To me, twitter isn’t a publishing platform. It’s an informal hangout. If I want to publish anything, I’ll put it on my blog, or as a comment on someone else’s.
Entries (RSS)
48 Direct Messages? “Direct Messages Zero” by Merlin Mann…..Clean that up!
I see where you are coming from. It would be nice if this decision didn’t have to be made at all.
For ME, and it’s just a personal thing, I prefer that people are able to discover me through my conversation more directly… you’re probably right that the bigger question is why we do *that* at all!
On the other hand, I don’t post anything to Twitter that I’m going to be worried about people outside of a closed group seeing. For me, Twitter is a community of practice, a collection of my peers and mentors, and while it’s informal it just isn’t THAT informal. If I had chosen to make a different kind of group, one that was limited to my core colleagues who are also friends and family, it would be different (as would the things I Twit).
And that’s one of the frustrations of Twitter– it really has to take on the characteristics of a single community for each user else it becomes overwhelming and distracting for all others. So my family, writing friends (who aren’t also colleagues… hi Jared!), and most irritating for me right now, my students really aren’t likely to be happy members of my Twitter community. And juggling multiple accounts is a real pain, not much of a workaround so far.
For getting my students into Twitter I’m thinking about making a second account that I own, having it befriend all my students, and sending all my student messages @that user … one proxy character per class? I don’t know.
I’m glad neither of us feel a need to cast the other out of Twitter-Eden for this kind of difference
no casting, type nor eden.
you’re right, in that twitter is different for everyone. for me, it feels a bit like all of us sitting around the table talking during NV’07. The table is much bigger and more diverse, but it’s a bunch of friends hanging out. that might not hold true - I haven’t met most of the people I follow on Twitter (something that has changed - I used to follow only people I ‘know”) - but I hadn’t met many of the people around that original table, either.
I’m having a hard time getting my head around this one! I was completely taken aback at the notion that someone would want privacy in twitter so I’m glad to see more conversation about it. But of course I’m getting why you would want privacy for certain conversations. It’s just that twitter doesn’t have that reputation.
I wonder if pub for a private conversation is the wrong metaphor. Sure it’s informal, and a nice combination of good conversation and totally goofing off, but I also go to a pub to bump into friends, get introduced to new people, and enjoy the serendipity. I think you leave the protect my updates box blank if you want a pub kind of conversation.
Maybe twitter needs another option. There’s @name or D name. G bla bla bla could be a private message to your group, meaning only the people you follow.
I left my thoughts on this over on Chris’s site (http://www.chrislott.org/2008/01/10/donning-the-twitter-condom/#comment-127944). I was never expecting total “privacy” with twitter, but nor was I expecting to see my words replicated elsewhere on the net by people I didn’t even particularly want listening in the first place. Yes, I suppose I could “block” those - on that front I think Twitter (and many other social systems) have some better ’splaining to do. Nowhere on the site can I find an explanation of what a user who has been blocked actually sees as a result, so for fear of sending someone an overly rude “you have been blocked” message (probably not, but who knows, other systems have been obnoxious like that in the past) I have hesitated to do so. I will from now on try not to tweet the changing of my twitter settings
I agree, and say so. I mention in my blog that I feel like my social connectivity is perfectly adequate and my small social network is growing “just fine, thanks” with updates protected.
This seems like a micro version of the discussion about blogs. When I post on my blog, I figure everyone is going to see it. But I have two blogs, one for history and one for online teaching. I have been criticized for compartmentalizing too much, and I run no “personal” blog at all. Do we follow people’s tweets because we want to hear all the details about their lives, warts and all? or do we want it to be like professional networking? It seems like two different goals to me.
Maybe Chris L is right. If you want to use Twitter among select communities, more than one Twitter identity would make sense. If you want to let it all hang out in a personal sense with one identity, I can see why going private might be the thing to do.
Lisa, they say 2 is compartmentalizing too much? I have 4: one for edtech, one for writing, one for skateboarding, one for teaching web design. I feel properly balanced. I don’t know if I would with Twitter accounts (though I did just have the very odd experience of having an actual student request to follow me this week. I did, and promised myself I wouldn’t complain about student projects on Twitter anymore. Maybe CogDog is right, and if one wouldn’t say it in public, one shouldn’t say it at all?)
I’m just getting into Twitter and have yet to get drawn into conversation. My updates are similiar to my blog updates — written knowing that the world can read them. Styling it as such is nearly all the fun.
— Blas
If you want to publish more text and more information use a blog because it is much easier to read. But for short messages Twitter is the better choice. So it is hard to compare these two forms of communication. It depends what and how much you want to say.
Welcome to functionality that already existed on Livejournal at least 5 years ago. Twitter is boring.
I had my Twitter updates listed as private until I made two accounts. I really have two different groups of people I talk to, so I made the new account private and invited a few people over there, and returned the original account to public. I like being able to discover new people who see my public account, but also the freedom of saying what I want on the other account without worrying about it being public on the net for all time.
I use Twhirl to manage the multiple accounts, and it works well for me. I like it much better than using the web interface.
I like that solution, Keri! twitterdee and twitterdum
[...] anything profound 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 [...]