[Sigia-l] Twitting yet?

[James Aylett]

Jamie Foggon wrote:

> Arranging rides though - I guess if you're on the move and can push a
> message out to everyone you know asking for a lift, that is quite
> handy. Twitter is not location based though is it? You would
> basically be spamming everyone on the off-chance that someone reads
> your message and happens to be in the right place at the right time? 

Twitter has controls so you can fiddle with who you get alerts from. We used it at SXSW to arrange bus rides out to one of the parties; the person coordinating twittered as each bus was filling up, so you knew whether to walk through the rain based on whether there'd be a space for you or not.

What I'm finding interesting now, having used twitter so much at SXSW, is the relationship I'm relaxing into. Better than many other previous things where the idea was to have information "flow" over you (I'm thinking particularly of Dave Winer's vision of RSS use), twitter actually works. Log off for a while, and (depending on preferences), that bit of twitter just doesn't exist for you - when you come back online, you start getting updates from then onward.

As Leisa has noted (in more elegant terms :-), twitter gives a great way of binding a community together. There are people scattered around the world that I'd like to feel closer to, but don't see or phone regularly enough. Twitter provides a way of us all sharing enough of our lives that when we do meet up again, we (hopefully) won't feel so separated.

> Plazes and Jaiku sounds more specifically useful in terms of location
> and time specific messaging, not sure what this sort of thing means
> in terms of privacy and safety in the future though. Would you want
> your location always known?   

I had quite a detailed conversation recently about just this - how do you build an easy way of controlling what of your personal data (location, status, anything else such as sex, gender etc.) becomes available to whom. It's quite an interesting problem, and certainly big enough that the margins of my life can't contain it at the moment :-)

James

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