Radical Transparency

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I've just recently started checking in on Facebook often, because I've just recently started playing with my Facebook status message.

I'm pretty sure my Facebook status isn't going to replace Twitter in my life, for I still dig Twitter, and I agree with Fred Wilson's call for improved Facebook-Twitter integration, but I love the extra little constraint the Facebook status message adds to the posting process. 

The Facebook status box is not a blank field in which I can impose whatever grammar I want.  It starts with my name, and, whether I like it or not, I'm the subject of of the status.  In third person.

Jake is missing Chinese toothpick ubiquity.

Jake will be ready, sometime between now and pretty soon.

Jake dreamt about coyotes that looked like little yapper bike basket dogs.

Silly silly.

But, as much fun as I'm having with the status message function and what I think is a totally creative microblogging constraint, Facebook just advertised its way onto my naughty list.

I had never had a problem with Facebook ads before.  I had never really even noticed them actually.  But, today, Facebook drops an ad into my news feed that's trying to recruit me to go to the developing world and proseltyze through language education, and, in response, not only am I posting a picture of the ad and half-assedly whining about it, but I'm also considering changing my religion on Facebook to Amish, which I think is pretty much the funniest thing anyone could possibly do on Facebook.

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I woke up today wanting to write but not knowing what to write. I thought about diving into the creative capitalism conversation and seeing what I could find in there. I thought about responding to an email a friend sent me about meat and responsible consumption. I thought about digging into some Clay Shirky. But I figured I'd do some reading first and then make some decisions.

A couple of tabs that have been sitting neglected in Firefox the past few days beckoned. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.

I reread a great article about simplicity and ubiquity. I read another article about web services that solve only problems that the web itself creates. And, since both mentioned Twitter, I stopped there and wandered off to see what the people I follow have been tweeting the past couple of days.

As I clicked back through some history, I started thinking about why I post what I post on Twitter.

And I remembered what a friend wrote me when she first read my Twitter feed:

it sounds like you're a crazy person! wtf are you updating people on your minutia? eating stale chips? what???

I told her it was an experiment, that I wasn't sure if Twitter would ever amount to anything for me, but I was trying to figure it out. And I dug it, dug the weirdness, dug people's willingness to tweet just about anything.

But that doesn't explain why I experiment the way I experiment: why I post about stale chips, Art Garfunkel, narrowly averted cupcake disaster, or Mr. Empty Promises.

I remembered some thoughts I'd had about posts of the week.

I had a moment a few weeks ago when I decided I wanted more storyteller microbloggers in my life, and I figured I could make that happen if I could locate a Twitter-fiend blogger that posts his or her favorite tweets of the week. Not his or her own tweets. Not a self-published greatest hits. Lots of people do that. I wanted to find a blogger that posts the choicest tweets from the set of microbloggers that he or she follows.

Ten minutes of searching for such a blogger proved fruitless, so I went back to work.

Later that day, however, I started dreaming about becoming that blogger. Every time I'd check in on Twitter, I'd favorite the tweets I enjoyed most, and, once I'd accumulated five or ten favorites, I'd throw them up on the blog and thank my Twitter friends for posting them.

I took the situation's pulse. I made a point to use the favoriting function for a couple of weeks. I looked for stuff that I thought was top quality. I favorited and unfavorited. And I had a good time. But I realized as I did it that I just simply couldn't count on myself to devote enough time to tweet reading to consistently come up with favorite tweets posts and make them good.

So I shelved the idea.

But I left a little archive of favorites on my Twitter account, and, now that I'm thinking about why I post what I post, I figure maybe those favorites can explain. Maybe they'll illustrate what I love about Twitter and what kind of microblogger I aspire to be.

@loiclemeur Kids look great on Segways while adult men look like sexual deviant people because of their posture

@mriggen OH: (To toilet-mastering preschooler, who's been having, ah, "issues")Remember, you control the poop. The poop does not control you.

@robinbloor Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplinlook-alike contest

@joeyheadset Fistbook is a social networking utility that connects my fist with YOUR face.

@christinelu WTF. some old man from Turkey on FB just edited details of how we kneweach other saying we dated in '92. that would put me at 16 you perve.

What do you think? Is it the storytelling I love? The vivid images they all conjure? The fact that they remind us that funny is everywhere, that life's more enjoyable if we're on constant lookout for silliness and share it whenever we can?

Hmmm.

Well. I don't know. I'll keep tweeting. Someday it'll all make sense. And, when it does, I'll explain in detail on the internets somewhere. In the meantime, I'll leave you with what is still perhaps my favorite tweet of all time.

Thank you Marc Andreessen for posting select dirty tweets for a few days last fall. This one I've thought about, both seriously and for laughs, quite a bit since then:

@PandaFace Girls like her f*** up the good guys and good guys f***ed up by girls like her f*** up good girls.. Never ending cycle.

*Note: The original plan was to post this to moreperfectmarket.com and chalk it up as a dinosaur post. But then I figured why post total ridiculousness on the serious blog now that I have a catch-all crazythought barrel up and running. But THEN I remembered that Posterous, the excellent little simpleblogging platform on which I'm writing unconstrained, has a new feature I want to try. So, now, I'm going to send this email to post@posterous.com, and, automagically, I'll post to both A More Perfect Market and to Radical Transparency (the aforementioned Posterous blog).

Filed under  //   clay shirky   experiments   posterous   storytelling   twitter  

Went to see Dweezil Zappa last night. Summed up my thoughts about the show on Twitter as I was walking out the door:

"Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Dweezil 'The Rattlesnake' Zappa!" Hahahahahaha...

Thought about posting Joe's Garage today to thank Dweezil and pay a little tribute to Frank, but as I listened a couple of times this afternoon, I realized I wasn't ready.

My love's so big for Ween right now, I couldn't concentrate on Joe's Garage.  I was thinking about I Don't Want It and Your Party and I Fell in Love Today.  I was thinking about Ween.  To post Zappa would be to go through the motions, and that wouldn't be fair to Zappa.

So I'm going to follow my heart here.

I fell in love today.  Again. 

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