To Twit To Who? Privacy dilemmas on Twitter.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 by Katie
After speaking up in class about how I didn't like Twitter, I was intrigued by all the hype and caved in and signed up to an account. Intially it was boring, but as began following more people, mostly celebrities, magazines or corporate organizations such as record companies I began to enjoy it more.
However as my friends have yet to make the leap from Facebook I have few followers, presenting me with the dilemma of whether to open my account to public viewing to get followers to tweet to, or keep it on private so that effectively I'm tweeting to myself. After much deliberation about what weirdos might be seeing my messages I decided to make my account public, something which I have avoided on all other SNS' in the past and goes against everything we have learnt in class, however on Twitter it so far seems to be the better option and provides a greater level of interaction and entertainment.
Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was this interesting article I found at ReadWriteWeb.com about the fact that Twitter saves everybody’s tweets and makes them searchable, therefore providing access to a huge historical database, taking citizen journalism to the extreme! One of the best things I have found about Twitter is it's accuracy and immediacy with breaking news, regularly beating traditional news sources, so in my opinion collating tweets for historical use would be a great idea; this also has the ability to provide a more democratic and equalizing voice for the people as well, creating a less biased account of history.