by David LeMieux
To make a long story short I flipped out a while ago and decided to make my internet life a lot more private. I closed up some errant, unused accounts on different services. I increased my profile security settings on others. One account that was in the later category was my twitter account. I decided to switch to protected updates. Now, about maybe a month later, I have turned them back to public.
This is what I learned along the way:
Pros
With protected updates I didn't have to worry about divulging someone more personal information. I could talk more about my location, current goings-on, and personal life without feeling like some anonymous stalker could be reading my public feed. I also received a lot less twitter spam and bot followers. Even when I did, I was quickly and easily able to shut off those accounts that seemed suspect. That kind of extra control was nice. A pleasant side effect of more control turned out to be that as I people requested to follow me I actually found some pretty interesting people to follow back.
Cons
Protecting my updates meant they would no longer appear on the public timeline. That also shuts you off from being found in twitter search results. Suddenly I was shut off from any public conversation whatsoever. I could not participate in any fun memes or discourse based on a tag or key word. Perhaps the most powerful feature on twitter is the search. It is a real-time glimpse in to what people are talking about. Not being able to contribute was frustrating. Protecting updates also brings on more awkward situations. At one point my own mother started following me and I was given the option to allow or deny her access to my status updates. It was an odd moment.
Feature Request
I want to have my cake and eat it to. I think that a nice feature would be to allow those with protected updates to make certain ones public. Twitter already uses the "d username message" convention for sending direct messages. Why not allow something like "p mesage" to create explicitly public messages. That way people who are privacy aware such as myself can have protected updates but then consciously choose to make certain updates public.
Protecting your updates certainly does make things a lot smoother on Twitter. Unfortunately it also completely removes you from the public conversation.
... and that fulfills my Twitter blog post quota for the year. Next subject, please!
UPDATE: I've turned private mode back on. I have decided that not having weird random followers and spam is more important to me that being part of the public conversation. I'm a flip-flopper I know.