The social loop between my foot and my mouth is now complete
November 24, 2008
Since my body and mind are refusing to do any productive work today, I thought I’ll spend some time to post this thought that has been ringing in my head for quite a while. As is pretty clear these days to any social media specialist, there is a very strong personal identity management aspect to the web today. The first thing that any HR worth his/her salt will do on receiving your resume, for example, is google your name. Secondly, they might use tools like Pipl, 123People or Spokeo to get deeper insights into what you’ve been up to on the web. If you’re on friendfeed, you can make their task a little easier and aggregate your online activities at one place. And, all of us are generating tons of stuff on the web for these services to aggregate and search. Try searching for your name on Pipl. If you are in the core demographic of the people who read this blog, I bet that you’ll find something in the results that you didn’t expect to see. And you can’t delete it.
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.
The family network graph is funny!
One good or bad thing with many is that i/we tend to post things which we didn’t want to on twitter…. Little did we realize that the moment the submit button is hit it is gonna ping on the desktop or the time line of the hundreds of people….
I always longed that the delete button would have some magical power to remove what i posted in the feeds of the recipient too!!
Twitkut is one small app which is making things positively worse.
Exactly, has happened to me more than once.
And if you are aggregating your tweets on friendfeed, tumblr, facebook, orkut, etc., then you’ll need to individually go to these sites and remove the offending tweet. That, I think, is due to using the wrong standard. RSS is great, but the way it is defined and used, you can only perform ‘ADD’ operations on the stream. IMHO, going forward, we need syndication which supports ‘DELETE’ and ‘UPDATE’ operations too. In some sense, we are at the ‘POP’ stage for syndication, and we need to move to ‘IMAP’
The part of “not being able to delete the footprints” in scary. I have also thought about it a lot of times and I do feel scared at times to make an account at websites like friendfeed.
But how do you think you are less conservative than Orkut and/or orkut?
Isn’t really the kind of publicity I was looking for :p Anyways, I actually want more people to be able to read my tweets. Maybe you are too concerned about your “casual” tweets. This is one of the tiniest repercussions
, and hence I deleted Orkut account now paranoid
Thoroughly enjoyed reading your post.The family network graph and the disclaimer about your brother was funny
All my tweets are casual, so from now on I won’t use any such application which will post my tweets on facebook & orkut.
Your style of writing is so convincing that at one point, you actually made me weigh the positives and the negatives of installing the app.