Social networking sites like Facebook and the like were fun when they started. You could be ensured of a reasonable degree of trust with them.
I don’t know if you have noticed lately, but Facebook have been slowly but surely selling off your privacy, and rights to the information you put on their site. They are doing this by just changing their Terms and Conditions from time to time. The changes have been slow and almost calculated.
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.
Gary Barber
I'm an independent User Experience Designer. I design and enhance complete web user experiences (websites), usable web interfaces, build web architectures, prototypes, conduct usability & accessibility tests or audits.
I just make your websites better than they are.
Want to find out more about me.
Need a specialist or an extra pair of hands...
Hire MeThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
