The all-public, all the time nature of the newly popular microblogging site Twitter just bit one of its users. Here’s what happened. Steve Rubel, a senior executive of major marketing company Edelman posted that one of the company’s clients, PC Magazine, “goes in the trash,” despite his “free sub[scription].” Whoops.
Now, PC Magazine is probably just not his preferred sunday afternoon reading, and nobody really can blame him for chucking it rather than letting it clutter up his house for no reason. And he probably just expected his comment to blend in with all the other mundane details of his everyday life that his six hundred friends and nine hundred followers may or may not read on his Twitter page. Sounds harmless enough, right?
Instead, his comment grew legs, and walked around the internet right to PC Magazine’s Editor in Chief, who, sanely and reasonably, decided not to boycott and blacklist Edelman. Rubel apologized, and didn’t get sacked. Hooray. Everybody’s behaving like adults.
There’s a deeper message here: private information exists. One of the major aspects of the Web 2.0 craze is freely available public data. Every site offers public, user submitted information for perusal. Mashups combine this information in new and creative ways. It’s a grand, exciting experiment, and it’s already producing some thrilling results.
But in the midst of this craze, people seem to be forgetting that not everything is public. Private data does exist. Myspace and Friendster learned this quickly, and added ways for users to hide their profiles from prying eyes. Flicker lets you make private and group photos. LiveJournal added private posting years ago. And you can bet your Twitter stock options that somebody at Twitter is working on a way to make a Twitter post private right now.
It’s nowhere clearer than in the event space that private information exists. Imagine if anyone could see all the events on your calendar. What if your mom looked at your calendar and saw “Take girlfriend to abortion clinic?” What if your boss saw “Fetish Night” on your calendar? What if your friend Bob saw “Suprise birthday party for Bob” in his “Upcoming events” on Mosuki? Bad news.
The companies that make it past the Web 2.0 hype and become the Yahoo!s and Googles, and AOLs and Flickrs and YouTubes of tomorrow will have to understand that private data exists, as well as offering public data. And the ones that don’t get it, and don’t get it right, won’t last.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.