Radical Transparency

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September 28, 2008

Today's Sign of the Apocalypse

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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August 03, 2008

Neglected Tabs, Storyteller Microbloggers, and the Neverending Cycle

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