Tweeting and Cake

To summarize this week at KOMU, ACM was a pain in the ass (as usual) and I made a huge breakthrough on the Money Commons Widget. Next step: embedability and aesthetics, then we're good to go.

But I don't want to dwell on that, because there's a much more interesting discussion/rant floating around Twitter.

I'm sold on Twitter. It took me almost 3 weeks, but I'm starting to see how it will becoming increasingly useful as I acquire more contacts.

Backstory: I know a lot of technical people. Most of them don't understand Twitter. Some of them laughed when I told them I had one. And for good reason: I don't care when that person I met yesterday at KOMU is doing their laundry.

Facebook emerged as a way to keep in touch with everyone you've ever met. It has utility. Twitter, or microblogging in general, sounds really petty. But what it becomes is one giant ongoing communal chatroom.

And the moment Jen mentioned "forced tweeting," my feed exploded. And it wasn't a neverending dribble of people doing routine things, it was a discussion.

There's a downside: I could only see a small part of the conversation, because I'm not following all the participants. So I thought being forced to Twitter meant being told, "Go sign up for Twitter and play with it." Apparently it meant "Jump in and use this as a reporting tool."

I have to agree, that's a terrible idea.

Why? Because it's just like giving Missourian reporters cameras. They go shoot without mics, you can't hear through the wind, they don't white balance, and when they come back to edit they put a dissolve between every cut.

It's not their fault, you just can't throw people into that without some sort of practice.

And then there's the other dilemma. We'll call it "The Things I See When I Google Myself" Dilemma. Or, more importantly, "Things My Future Employer Will See When He Googles Me" Dilemma.

We live in a funny age. There are lot's of people who support blogging, Twitter, the idea that everyone can publish their thoughts at the click of the button. And then there's the old guard who not only stay out of it, but will making hiring decisions based on what they find in people's personal content.

Some of this is common sense, of course. No one can reasonably think that posting drunken pictures of themselves in a public forum is a good iea. But at the same time, CNN has fired people for blogging. Most of the time, they weren't blogging about work, either.

This can be pretty extreme, especially when we get into some old school journalists who solemnly believe journalists shouldn't vote in order to remain objective.

And here's a slightly radical suggestion: there's absolutely no way to determine what will upset someone you haven't met.

So we have some options. We can operate semi-anonymously, using handles and protected profiles. We can write nothing but sterile material. (I have almost never conducted an interview where something isn't being held back because the source - for entirely fair reasons - doesn't want it published.) We can say to hell with it, that we don't want to work for anyone who wouldn't hire us on the basis of a blog isn't someone we want to work for. (Requires large ego.)

But in all likelihood, this will resolve itself in the next decade.

In the meantime, I have a suprisingly Google-proof name.