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I’m pretty public on my use of social media applications like Facebook, twitter and my own personal blogging. Normally I’m not too worried about what I share on these sites or who reads. I’ve not got much of anything to hide so I don’t think about it what people may think or see when they read something of mine.

 

Speaking with a friend of mine though and they were amazed at how easy it was for someone to find everything they’d said on twitter. Now, let’s clarify, unless you specifically have all of your updates protected, everything you tweet is going into the public timeline for ANYONE to read, not just those who follow you. People need to be aware of this.

Here’s the challenge though, even if you individually block someone from subscribing to your updates or "following" you, they can still follow you on your public timeline and see what you’re saying. Yes, this activity would be very stalker-ish and it’s annoying we have to worry about it, but it is what it is.

I normally am a little irritated when I’m followed by someone that has their updates protected as I believe twitter should be an open forum to some degree. This issue though has me really re-thinking how I feel about that. I would hate to exclude anyone that might have a reason to really be hiding from other individuals from using the service, but I’m not sure what the best answer is for everyone.

Perhaps it’s just education and let people know about the opportunities and risks. Perhaps you have an online persona like I do in "bnpositive", although it wouldn’t be hard to link the too in my case, there’s nothing specifically in my twitter profile that ties that account to my real name.

What do you think is the solution? Were you aware of the issue? Very interested in hearing your feedback and comments.

Image: Edited image from sxc.hu

If you’re on twitter but you regularly use a twitter client like twhirl, tweetdeck, Destroy Twitter or even Seesmic Desktop, you’ve probably not been to the twitter website recently. If you have been on the website you probably haven’t seen the homepage because you have to sign-out to see it.

Did you miss it? Yep, that’s the new homepage. It’s quite a significant design change compared to what was there before. There’s more of an emphasis on what’s being talked about on the network and even searching for your own keywords that maybe you’re interested.

I think this helps those people that are new to micro-blogging network and they can immediately start seeing some of the power of what’s available as a resource. I see twitter as more of a social search engine than a micro-blogging platform that everyone just shares what they’re doing and where they’re at during the day. There is that component in the service, but for me it builds on the relationship and trust I put in those I follow. I’m interested in learning more about these individuals and hearing those items, introduces me to more of who they are.

The power of twitter is the network itself. Determine the way you want to participate and use the network for your needs and you have the power of twitter at your fingertips.

I’ve been blogging a bit lately about how we have this unneeded fascination with the size of our technology devices. I’ve argued that for my personal preference having the smallest version of something doesn’t really matter to me, in my daily work, portable is more helpful than completely mobile.

I’m going to contradict myself a bit now with that argument. When it comes to screen real-estate, I want an effective use of space. This argument may be less of a rant on size though and more of a rant on flexibility and personal preference.

This was recently made clear to me as I was trying to customize the display and organization of my toolbars in Mozilla Firefox.

If we take a look at the graphic above, there’s an illustration of what I’m talking about here. Layered towards the back of the graphic is how my collection of toolbars currently display in Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1. Taking up quite a bit of screen space.

My preference, after manually editing how I’d like things to be organized in a graphics program, is the way the color graphic is displayed. It’s a little hard to tell perhaps, but my Firefox related toolbars are stacked horizontally at the top, with the bookmarks bar below, then followed by my Google Toolbar and StumbleUpon toolbar’s stacked horizontally at the bottom. Three lines of toolbars instead of the previous five lines of toolbars.

From what I can tell, in Firefox, toolbars are locked and cannot be stacked horizontally to save space. Am I missing something that will allow me to do that?