And that’s the thing about the web and social applications, which is not necessarily bad, but its something that not everyone understands. It’s hard to remove your footprints.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to share in this post. It’s an imaginary scenario that popped into my head the day I installed Twitkut on my Orkut profile. (Disclaimer: The author of the app is my younger brother. I am giving his app free publicity here in the hope that he’ll stop asking me for a MacBook for Christmas.) It’s an app that shows my tweets on my orkut profile and in my orkut update stream. As soon as I installed the app, I realized that it wasn’t the smartest idea in the world. You see, I post a lot of stuff on twitter that I expect only a small set of people to read. I know any one can read all of my posts by simply going to my twitter home, but I don’t expect them to care enough to go there, or to even know enough about me to go there. I certainly don’t expect my mom to go there. And I know she never will. She’s a normal person who uses a computer only for utilitarian purposes that include email, skype and browsing photos. That’s it. And Twitter, as a smart person I know once said, Twitter is still this underground movement in the whole scheme of things, and sometimes its surprising to the ‘tweeter’, as it may, when a more mainstream audience gets access to and comments on the tweet.

Now, Orkut is a social network that is becoming increasingly and scarily mainstream in India. I have school friends, ex-bosses, cousins, relatives and even past teachers as friends on Orkut. (I have my advisor as a friend on Twitter, but that’s another story) And my tweets aren’t meant to be read by all of these people. Especially the relatives. Because that brings them from the online social domain to the very active Ahuja family network domain. Here’s a potential scenario:

I’m willing to be my guinea pig and wait for this to happen some day. When it does, I promise to report in full detail. Till then, enjoy tweeting and friend-feeding, and remember to keep forgetting to keep those wild party pics private. It’s so much more fun to browse through photos when you know you are not meant to see them.