Tag Archives: microblogging

Reasons for a Private Twitter Stream

May
5
2009

People have often asked me why is your twitter stream is set to private.   Why don’t you just open it up to the rest of the world like everyone else does.  Don’t you get this social networking thing.  Why are you just trying to keep things private, when if you have a footprint on the web it’s just a little pointless.

Well yes there are lots if good reasons to open up a twitter stream to the public, here are a few:

  • It’s really easy for people to decide to connect with you if they can read your previous tweets.

Open Twitter

Sep
1
2008

Rusty Gate

If you think about it Twitter is a bit of a walled garden, a closed system as Sean Carmody has pointed out.  You have to be on Twitter to use Twitter; a little like Facebook or AOL.  Maybe what we need to step beyond Twitter into an open message distribution service, this would help with the load issue if nothing else.

Stepping beyond the walled garden will allow services like Twitter to jump the shark and avoid the problems AOL had. They were popular with the early adopters to start with, then the mob got bored and moved on, the shininess and gloss just waned away.