Bad Penny » twitter

Public and Private

Ian Gorrie — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:26:47 +0000

In this brave new internet world (as of about 1995), I’ve been thinking of my personal information sharing generally as public and private.

Information Classification

Because of my work, classifying information comes as second nature. I have two separate and non-intersecting information streams. You are reading part of one of them.

100% of the talk about people on social networks and things going horribly wrong are people who don’t make clear distinctions between the public, professional, personal, and social aspect of their lives. Getting into etiquette with social networks can be tricky. I find it best to, as a rule, separate business and pleasure.

Partial Disclosure

Public information is available for anyone in the world to read. I put it out there so that people can learn a bit about me.

The reason I started writing things in the public eye is because I realized that if I didn’t define myself and give people something to read who didn’t know me, someone else would. This is the same reason that I don’t publish raw slide decks of my presentations, but I put my speaking points intermixed with the slides in a blog posting. Text based communication loses a lot of intent and inflection, so I try to make up for it in this way.

I didn’t want to have a blog. Once upon a time, when I was younger (and even more naive), I thought that I could get by on merit alone; I believed that if I did good work, my work would be recognized for and stand on its merits. I read things like The Fountainhead (watch the movie) and took from it “Oh! If I do good work and work toward my own sense of excellence, I will triumph in the end!”

I don’t think so anymore. I think success takes more than merit.

Not only do you have to do good work, but people need to know about it. You need to help people directly, impart lessons you’ve learned without being an arrogant jerk, and sell them on why a good solution is better than a thought-to-be-sufficient solution.

Blogging

When Livejournal came out, I thought that this was lame in the same way Jennicam was lame. My conclusion was that blogging was about media and attention seeking. I didn’t have a need to have a public blog for people who didn’t know me could learn tons about me without my knowing them.

More importantly, it wasn’t interesting.

I found it massively egotistical that anyone would want to know what I bought at the grocery store or ate for lunch. I didn’t understand sharing of the mundane. Clearly many people do not share this opinion today.

The stuff I put on my blog are my presentations, the way I manipulate data for my own uses when I haven’t seen it represented in my way previously, or my attempts to explain the poorly explained. The ideal that I aspire to is “I wouldn’t find it interesting to read, I don’t write it.” I imagine that might come off as rampagingly egotistical at times, but I really make an effort not to be. I laugh at myself and at life as much as possible. It’s pretty ridiculous a lot of the time. My work tends to be very serious and can effect, in a real appreciable way, the lives of others. I take it very seriously. When people do important work badly, I can take it as a personal affront.

I would like to post more, but too much of it is sensitive, under contractual obligations, or in personal confidence. Unlike many people that do not share my views, I can’t disclose in good faith.

Social networks

What I find interesting about social networks, and by that I mean mostly Twitter and Facebook, is that it can introduce a gray area between public and private information; a social periphery of information that busy people share in order to keep in touch with people they think are cool.

That’s pretty much how I view a friends list; “These are people I think are cool.” If I would invite you to an informal party is my general baseline for inclusion into my social network.

Twitter: Low attention span blogging and random link sharing.

Bad Penny: Informal writings, past sharable presentations, and general information sharing of things I find interesting.

Facebook: Fun people that I associate with socially.

LinkedIn: People I have done business with or know professionally that I would vouch for. Yes. I really do know all of those people and have had dealings in the past.

Be Cool

As any good rule, it is proven by its exceptions. Excessively cool people are allowed to break most rules.

My advice to everyone: be excessively cool and don’t take things seriously that do not merit being taken seriously.

Life is too short to be taken seriously. — Oscar Wilde

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. –Mark Twain

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. –Friedrich Nietzsche

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. –Tom Robbins

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father. –Roger von Oech

New Nettiqute: A simple guide to communicating with your favorite geeks.

Ian Gorrie — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:31:48 +0000

It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen an updated guide on email etiquette or netiquette in general.

This may be because there is about 300 guides written by out of work journalists whose’ exposure to technology was having played with an iPhone for about 5 minutes. I believe that they’re in the same place in my brain where banner ads and sponsored links land and are thus culled and ignored almost immediately. Ask the big geeks you know, and you will find that they have brain-based adblock enabled as well.

(I just spent 5 minutes trying to figure out if I should put an apostrophe there and where it would correctly belong in that sentence. I think I know too many grammar nazis.)

Oh. Okay. Thanks. Fixed.

So really, what I mean to say is that there doesn’t seem to be one of worth lately, though I’m sure someone will add some in the comments to this posting eventually. The things like social networks and twitter, the places where one is really needed, are the places where a bunch of people write 500 horrible guides.

Here’s where nettiqute was when this whole internet thing happened. Notice how a lot of people you know don’t not-do these things. Notice how Eternal September will never end. This is why a lot of old school types have quit irc or have retreated to backwater +i or +k channels.

Here’s ten four things to keep in mind

1) If it is important, it’s not something that should be sent in a text message. Text messaging is for 14 year old girls and introverts who don’t mind taking 5 minutes to communicate what they could have talked about in 30 seconds. Perhaps what they really need to make is a subvocalizing phone. Then like one half of the female population will be on confs with each other most of the waking day.

On second thought, please don’t. Please do not make those.

(Did you know that Google Voice already had confs built in?)

2) If you are having an issue with your computer or technology and want to talk to me about it, send it from an IM client that can screen share so that you can demonstrate it and I can fix it. ^{[Only close family and intimates eligible. Offer void when I am busy or already frustrated.]}

So anyway.

3) Twitter. If you can avoid it, do. If you find that you have to use it, is painful enough already without having to look at stuff like this:

But he’s not like that all day and night, right?

Wrong.

I hear you’re cool and all in person, but I can’t do this anymore, Chris! Argh!

This came in while I was writing this:

Quoting fictional characters? Picard is someone’s role model? Gah. It’s like this all over Twitter. It’s horrible.

Additionally: No Mom, I will not teach you to use Twitter. It was bad enough an idea when I taught you to text message. I learned my lesson.

4) Don’t touch my phone. I’m serious.

I judge you: A social networks commentary

Ian Gorrie — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:16:18 +0000

Everywhere you go, there are people talking about social networks. Why is this, you may ask? There have always been social networks using things like human voice, postal mail, telephones, business cards, and I suppose it hasn’t been as easy to profit from them indirectly until recently.

When people talk about risks of social networking, and they’re not a penetration tester, I usually consider them to be all about the FUD to sell services. All of the old confidence scams are new again.

Investors have been interested in crowdsourced social networking companies leveraging web tew point omg technology to generate nearly-free content that is worth about as much as there is no trust network or quality weighting to them. Years of exploiting web 2.0 applications and evil twin attacks have proven this, but it is still a topic of ongoing conversation and innovation in data promiscuity.

If you’re going to take in talks that outline the new risks of social networks and web 2.0 application trust problems, I’d suggest the following:

Abad’s Web 4.0 talk that was given at the first Seattle Toorcon
Social Zombies: Your Friends want to eat Your Brains at this the last Defcon
Shawn Moyer and Nathan Hamiel’s presentation demonstrating Evil Twin attacks on social networks at Blackhat/Defcon last year

There are also somewhat lame examples like this one that just show the information that the API is designed to share.

This doesn’t even enter into the problems of profit motive and the ensuing hijinks that the site operators seem to fall into routinely.

I find this speaks very well to the “Twitter Phenomenon” as it is called; people who want attention from those that have a 140 character or less attention span and think more of poorly documenting an experience than actually enjoying it.

Highly unique individuals (who are just like their friends) are flashmobbing, printing ironic t-shirts via online boutiques, liveblogging events instead of participating and paying attention, and taking hundreds of photos instead of enjoying whatever they’re doing.

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

Additionally, I have a diminished impression of you as a person if you exhibit these social network behaviors:

Flooding my news feed with a bunch of quizzes describing describing what kind of My Little Pony you are. Extra points for the test being apparently written by an illiterate 12 year old.
Declaring your undying affection and fandom for things like “Sunshine” and “Delicious Cake.” This fandom includes giving your subscriber information to the Delicious Cake Chieftain.
Adding a bunch of applications where you invite everyone you know in the universe to get extra credit in a game where 90% of people playing it are 15 year old autistics with obsessive compulsive disorder. (note that they are older than the aforementioned quiz authors.)
You call yourself a visionary, an evangelist, or some riff of “strong leader.” Other people call you that. You do not.
You have an online profile for each of your sociopathic personalities and non-interacting friend groups. I know non-fun individuals who have more than four on the same social networks. Why do I know them? Cause they’ve been kicked out of the social circles I participated in.

I think it’s great for people to work on their personal brand, reputation, and business in social networks. There is a problem though. I am seeing that many people, possibly the majority of super contributers, are favoring a brand presence than honesty or legitimacy.

I think it’s great when people get along, but not calling things as they are when it is important in favor of future rewards is, in this nerds opinion, disingenuous at best and misleading and harmful at worst. People need to learn to relax and find their own rhythm. There’s enough pretending people out there. It would be better to have authentic opinion and rhetoric that you can stand behind.

Of course if you’re really dumb, this can hurt you. Staying out of trouble is pretty obvious. If you’re not very sharp, it is always a pretty good idea to stay away from complexity.

I’ll finish my upcoming talk about the technology social periphery sometime soon which will include case study on people I find to be the ideal demographic for social networks.

If this whole topic isn’t old and boring for you now, and I really hope that it is, you can find more reading material and news at sites like Social Media Security.

Twitter, Defcon, Geotaging

Ian Gorrie — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:25:59 +0000

So I caved and succumbed to the lameness of Twitter mostly for the purposes of attending and coordinating things at large events. It’ll be hard to flow of people and places at events like Defcon without it.

Mostly I view twitter as a noise application. It posts “microblogging,” a term which people with near zero attention spans seem to say a lot, updates everywhere, it uses the @username to respond to things. I view it as the ALL CAPS communication medium.

So I’m not in love, but I will use it via Twibble on my Nokia n95 to geotag myself and figure out where people I know are having fun when there are a few thousand people milling around.

There will also be flashmob like behavior coordinated by a con twitter id during the event itself.