Twitter gave me something new this week. Showed up on Tuesday morning, right there on my desktop, a little “Activity” tab to make sure I knew exactly, in real time, when the people I follow were deciding to follow others (and making it easy for me to do the same), when they were marking Tweets as “favorites,” and other ways they were using a service I love, value and rely on every day.
I’d been hearing about this enhancement since August, but its arrival on my computer made it real, and gave me the opportunity to see how my actions and decisions on this platform were being documented and promoted to the 930 people in my Twittersphere.
I’ve always used Twitter favorites as a bookmarking tool, a way to tag something of interest, typically on the fly, to be able to quickly find my way back to it later, as opposed to, say, “I love this Tweet so much I want to marry it.” More recently, I’ve relied on an ifttt recipe to automatically send links in Tweets I favorite to my Instapaper read later folder. I appreciate the simplicity and one-click functionality. It has made my life, and the ability to aggregate and process information, easier.
And now those decisions are being broadcast, along with new people/accounts I decide to follow, in my activity stream. “Jim Maiella publicly expressed interest in this content, or this person, this was important to him for some reason, and you - as his follower - should know this, pay heed and comport yourself accordingly.”
I know this is not new, follows and favorites were already public, part of the elegantly simple way Twitter was designed, which has - at times - influenced my decisions. The fact that they are now being packaged and promoted will push this dynamic further. It’s worth noting that there was already a perfectly fine way for me to highlight links or content I thought merited special treatment - by Tweeting it, in my “regular” feed, in any number of forms. Text with a link, Retweet, Retweet with commentary (as space allowed), plenty of ways to say, “HEY, PEOPLE, LOOK AT THIS!”
The new Activity tab prompted me to write, but this is hardly all about Twitter. Facebook recently announced a new version of its Open Graph, designed to enable “frictionless” sharing by its users. Why ask someone to click a “Like” button when you can click it for them? Listening to an REO Speedwagon song on Spotify? Why shouldn’t everyone connected to you be able to share in the embarrassment, as it’s happening. Read a story on a blog, or stream a video? Isn’t it more fun to tell everybody? Some have characterized frictionless sharing as “silent total surveillance.” While that may sound alarmist, it doesn’t seem to be factually incorrect.
This is the ante to engage in social media today - real, assumed, eventual - everything you do will be shared with everyone connected to you, all the time, as it happens. If you have a problem with that, then back to your cave and just don’t participate, as if that’s a real choice anymore. As George Clooney said to Matt Damon in Ocean’s Eleven, “You’re either in or you’re out.” And, when it comes to the social Web, we’re talking all the way in.
Some wonder why all this oversharing would be a problem for anyone. Why wouldn’t you want to express, to people you’ve chosen - or who have chosen you - Tweets you favorite, music you’re listening to, new contacts you’ve decided to associate with. Well, lots of reasons, different for everyone and for every action.
I think about the way I mark Tweets with links as favorites. Suddenly, “This looks interesting, and I might want to read it later,” becomes a public act, a form of self expression. The story about the business competitor, how to get a job at Apple, strategies for dealing with annoying relatives over the holidays, effective treatments for psoriasis or body odor - whatever it is, there it is, for everyone to see.
This forced transition from personal bookmarks to aggressively promoted public declarations will change the way I use the functionality, and that’s irritating to me. Something that worked (in its original form, and made better by ifttt) now sometimes doesn’t. There are workarounds, but suddenly it’s incumbent on me to do the working around. And why limit update activity to favorites and follows? What about the decision to unfollow someone, or to send a direct message? Doesn’t that imply a stronger connection between two people, and shouldn’t everyone in my virtuous Twitter circle know that? No? Why not? Who gets to make that call?
In a few weeks, we’re taking our daughters to see Taylor Swift, who sometimes Tweets photos from concerts and thoughts on upcoming shows. It might be interesting to follow her, share her material with the kids in the run-up to our brief time together. But do I want to broadcast “@jimmaiella is now following @taylorswift13” across my entire base of followers? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Not really my call anymore. Sharing in life has always been a decision, not a state of being. That’s increasingly not the case in social media.
I understand why Twitter is doing this, to crank up its “social graph” and promote usage by creating a more dynamic timeline, making it more clear to me how the people I follow are using the service, offering new ideas for others to follow - expanding the ecosystem, generating revenue. Same thing with Facebook. But I wonder whether these efforts may have the opposite effect.
What if Google decided it would be a great idea to automatically send an e-mail to every individual in my address book on regular intervals listing “all the Gmail users Jim Maiella has corresponded with recently.” Hey, the objective is just to raise awareness, to make Gmail more dynamic and expand its user base by showing - publicly - how people are using the best e-mail service on the planet. The company actually bumped up against this crazy idea with its failed Buzz product, which consumer outcry helped kill, but who knows where Google+ is going. You do. I mentioned my issue with Twitter favorites to a friend and the immediate response was, “Just wait until Google+ starts broadcasting everything you search for.”
Confronted with Facebook’s new frictionless sharing capabilities at the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Google’s social guy Vic Gundotra said, “There is a reason that every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth.” Even though it may have been a defensive, competitive dismissal, the line resonated. Take what’s happening on social networks to the extreme, applied to real life, and we’re all walking around with animated dialogue boxes hovering over our heads, broadcasting every thought, every passing notion. “Jesus, you look fat today. Oh, I’m sorry, did I actually say that?”
So how does all of this shake out? I don’t know. Clearly, social networks have reasons and business motivations for opening things up as far as they can - to promote usage, generate revenue, new opportunities and growth. Maybe most will be fine with this, won’t care about the enhanced public dissemination of personal decisions or will adapt their behavior to living in a frictionless world. Maybe the rising tide of 800 million Facebook users can’t be wrong.
Or, maybe, people will curtail the social connections they forge on these platforms, move away from tonnage, with the knowledge that everything they like, every new contact they make, every Web page they visit, story they read or song they listen to is being communicated to their entire follower/friend population. Maybe the uninitiated who are thinking about making the leap into social will instead take a step back. Maybe new services will emerge and find success by traversing this ground more carefully, giving the end user more power to customize their sharing and make these decisions for themselves.
Twitter, today, gives you two options - your account is “private,” which for most people is like owning a car with no wheels, or it’s public. Total restriction or total openness - nothing in between. I never saw marking a Tweet “favorite” as a promotable act, any more than bookmarking a Web page - why can’t that be an option in my Twitter profile, whether or not to enable my outbound “Activity” feed, communicate favorites, or even follows? Not wanting to wander through town with a megaphone announcing every movement, “TURNING LEFT ON MAIN STREET, ABOUT TO HIT THE ATM,” doesn’t mean your intent is to skulk around in a fedora hat and a trench coat. There can be a middle ground, just like there is in the real world.
People who want to take the time and devote the effort to deciding for themselves what and how to share will do so - unless the decisions are all made for them, which is where it appears we are clearly going, to an ever greater degree, whether we like it or not.
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