With the recent surge in popularity of Twitter, I have been wondering how much information is too much when sharing thoughts, discoveries and observations with the community.
While some people share interesting, insightful titbits with the twitter community, others seem to think it’s just as important to share their toilet habits, what they think of their latest cup of coffee, what they think of the person sat next to them, what they had for breakfast, that they have an itchy foot, and so on.
Perhaps I’m being unfair.
As consumers, we take different things from the world surrounding us. While I personally may not be interested in the minutae of other’s day, others may be - and by the same token I may be interested in some of the minutae. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and perhaps all of us who post information into the public realm through blogs, microblogs, or social networks should be more mindful of the quality of information we share.
Having expressed doubts about pumping too much into the firehose, I am now going to about face, and enthuse about the integrations that are happening…
If you join Twitter, your posts can be automatically sucked into your Facebook status via the Twitter application in Facebook
If you then install Tweetie, or Twitterific on an iPhone, you can take a photo and post it directly into TwitPic (and therefore Twitter) with a nice short url embedded in the message for the photo you took.
Therefore, you can be out and about, see something interesting or funny, take a photo, and immediately post it to your friends on Facebook via Twitter and TwitPic. How cool is that?
I’m guessing the new found abilities to share more and more information - text, photos and video - so quickly with so many often outweighs the prudence we might otherwise employ in the “real world”. It’s the famous quote from Jurassic Park, isn’t it - “you were so wrapped up in the idea that you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should”.