Ephemera and Permanence — Tweets for Life

Respectfully, Doc, I think you underestimate the value of the permatweet.

I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets.

The flow-by web is great for sampling the current pulse of selected friends, an ephemeral dipping of the news ladel into a current river of updates. Yet it is also a place where people share things they often don’t share elsewhere, which makes it a great fishing pond for lightweight pointers to interesting media.

I have often used my own tweet stream–or others’–as a reference point when looking for websites or YouTube videos I first saw in the update stream. This happens consistently with media that’s fun enough to tweet but not important enough to blog. Often, in ordinary conversations, I find myself referring to resources I linked to in a prior tweet. Sometimes I just piont them to my Twitter account. Other times, I look it up myself and email the link.

Perhaps that works for me more than most because I don’t tweet that frequently, so my history is relatively compact. However, everyone’s tweets stick around, see My First Tweet as a case in point. In fact, it is perhaps more problematic that people consider these tweets gone, when, in fact, they are not.   Even though it is possible to delete your tweets from you stream history, it doesn’t remove them from all the downstream syndicators and third-party clients.

People should have more control over the lifetime of our shared information. In particular, it seems to me that people should be able to share information in one of two modes: at-will and on-the-record.

At-will posts can be erased by the owner at will, whenever they want, thus avoiding those embarrassing photos–and the resulting oppression from the future that keeps us from living fully in the present.

On-the-record posts are taken to be additions to the permanent record, with all parties understanding that they will be (or should be) always accessible. This allows for statement by officials operating in their official function, statements of policy, contractual agreements, and similar permanent records.

Everyone should be able to decide in which mode they want to share information, just as we can select a Creative Commons license as an alternative to copyright.  A simple microformat-style tagging system would go a long way to enabling a self-asserted, voluntary compliance approach.  Even better would be a data sharing protocol that could actually assure that compliant parties erase the at-will data when we no longer want those hot tubbing photos shared publicly.

Instead, we currently have a lot of frustration and surprises when people share information in one context only to find it appearing in another, undesirable one, some unpredictable time in the future. SMS messages, emails and Facebook photos, all show up in the most inopportune places and times. Managing these contexts–and the information we share in each–is vital in a world where we fluidly flip contexts as quickly as kaleidescopes change color.

As a co-proposer of the User Managed Access working group and acting co-chair of the User Driven & Volunteered Personal Information workgroups at Kantara, I am hoping we can find a way to make this new model work. Because the current model is too fragmented to be managed reasonably, and it is only going to fragment further unless we start to unify around user-driven principles or something similar.