It's always interesting to turn questions around to ask the mirror-image. People are very concerned about the power of a connected world to threaten our given notions of privacy. But what about the mirror image of that question, what do we ask about the internet exhibitionists, like me?
You name the new on-line doohickey and I promise you I have a profile on it. From Friendster to tribe.net and flickr to filmloop I will sign up for any digital magic beans the carnival barker tells me about.
How many Myspace pages are going to come back to haunt people? It’s not even considered invasion of privacy to Google someone anymore. A poll of single friends tells me that about 30 seconds after they meet someone that name is being searched. Far from being an invasion of privacy, its more often considered only common sense.
So my latest thing has been www.twitter.com (I'm user anthro61 if you want to follow my mutterings). The concept is fairly simple; all you're doing is writing small short snippets about what you're doing at that particular moment in time. It's like being able to get small slices of many people’s days. Now personally I think this particular website is a non-starter. Do we really need yet another stream of content popping up on our phones, sites, IM’s, etc?
What is a little interesting is how the Edwards campaign is actually using it. Supposedly John Edwards (read: the intern that can spell I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T) sends a message a couple times a day to twitter that says where he is and where he is going to be next.
But, at the end of the day… who cares? Who wants a blog in minature?
