The Re-Linking

Those of you fortunate enough and/or with enough spare time to read my Facebook, Twitter and Blog sites are aware that I recently de-coupled Twitter updates automatically updating Facebook statuses. I did this for a very specific reason, and have just “un-done” this for another. I had a few people comment on that decision, and felt I should explain it in more detail.

I think the concept of “Status” has vastly changed and continues to evolve in the virtual world we tend to view each other in.

When Facebook first was rising it was no more than MySpace without the annoying interface, I held off signing up for a good couple years, as I was more about “doing it myself” at that time. As such, I wrote my own blog program which was basically a minimalistic WordPress without any skins or fancy add-ins and definitely didn’t dominate in the professional and amateur world of blogging. But it worked for me and allowed me to learn new PHP and CSS skills, so why not?

My “Status” at this point was really static. I had a basic About page that essentially (with a little more wit I hope) said: “I’m 21 years old @ UoG and I tend to drink a lot of beer”. But technology and inquiring minds were not content with this dorment and long term relevant data, so as tecnology and speed of access continued to grow, Facebook moved “Status” into a changing forum of “Craig Stoss is …” land. And while “Craig Stoss is 26 years old, a UoG grad and still drinking too much beer”, our voyueristic tendencies have taken this even further.

What used to be a daily update or two on Facebook from “Craig Stoss is sleeping” to “Craig Stoss is at work and eating snacks” to “Craig Stoss is going out tonight”, the public demanded Facebook remove the “is” and spawned a new concept of our “Status” world where at a click I can get a brief summation (and an accurate timestamp of said “Status”) of all my Facebook friends. It allowed your “Status” to not be tied to you are all. By removing the small ‘is’ the freedom was given to type any update you chose. But Facebook had a few problems. 1) it isn’t an easily visual medium for mobile devices and the Blackberry and iPod apps are still HCI nightmares and 2) logins and security were hindering lay people access to the up-to-minute details they so craved without all that pesky permissions crap getting in the way.

Enter Twitter.

Twitter not only gave us the ability to see anyones realtime “Statuses” in chronological order, but now we had an interface that was agnostic to medium. Its vast extensibility all but encouraged and begged developers to find ways to dig deeper into our personal lives, and at the same time make them instant and accurate! Now I can post a photo in real time of the shutter closing. I can provide you with a map accurate within meters of where I am standing and locate others who “Tweet” in my vicinity.  And I can follow trends of what people are talking about most and join “conversations” with absolute strangers.

Our “Status” literally has become the very thing we were doing that instant, not a generic or vague reference to something happening or about to happen, but an actual view to that instant in time.

There is a Vedic language where each word is in itself the make up of the object the word describes. So the word “tree” would describe the tree itself. We have now converted this to ourselves: We are no longer a series of long running activities and chapters of our life such as “I am 21 and attend UoG” we are now a series of points in time strung together and interleaved with other points in time “I am 26 and 9 months and am currently in Paderborn Germany at the Best Western room 705″, or even more granular “I am taking a crap in said hotel room, it had corn in it”.

I de-coupled Twitter and Facebook for that reason. In my opinion, and as sure as the sun will shine tomorrow there will be disagreement, Facebook is not a place for granular updating of the milliseconds on my life. It is a more gradual timeline of my growth in various friendships, the travels I have done and the activities I do on a generic scale so that people close and formally close can understand the person I am and am becoming. It has generic references to me being single, my birthdate, my trip to Australia, not specific instances of un-censored details held together via nothing more than the neurons in my brain firing in different patterns when I react to something external to me.  Twitter is just that (for me). A timeline of quick random thoughts I have as my days progress. I minimilize the experience into a phrase of 140 characters, hopefully with a bit of wit and insight to my “Status” at that given point In time.

They serve different purposes and will continue to do so until we replace Facebook and Twitter with whatever comes next in the technological journey we are on.

However, all that being said, I have chosen to recouple them as of this week as over the next 4-8 weeks I will on the road extensively and, while I want to maintain a separation of who I am vs. the instant I am experiencing, I feel the two have a MasterCard style Venn diagram when remote from the comfort of my home and work laptops.  So, please excuse the amount of updates, but also enjoy the ride! I hope to bring you plenty of updates via Twitter/Facebook from India, Germany, Switzerland, the US and wherever else I am taken and hopefully will have some chance to blog a bit along the way! I am a bit geeky after all