Twitter, Sergey Brin, and living in a Facebook world

First, I have a confession: I now have a Twitter account. For a long time, I've been a serious hater of the service, believing that the main goal of Twitter is to promote small, self-important people by assisting them in gathering an army of even more pathetic sycophants. I still believe that to be one unfortunate use of the service, but there is also something else happening on Twitter with regards to the dissemination of information. At Mzinga, our support team is using it as a kind of public, archived IM to provide both one-on-one assistance and instant FAQ's. And recent events like the Mumbai terrorist attack lead to some interesting questions about Twitter as a kind of broadcast network. There is a lot of noise on Twitter, but there is also a kind of mechanical turk quality (that's a good thing) to it's information sharing. It could be that marriage of Google and Twitter (rumored as being discussed) could be the basis to crystalize it's true value prop - to society or business or wherever it lands. Anyway, what exactly the "it" is that's it's providing I'm not precisely sure of yet, but I'm there observing.

One of the streams I'm following is TechCrunch - primarily for professional purposes. They have an article on their site about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. Apparently, he started a blog back in the Fall of '08 but after a couple posts (the second of which he revealed something semi-personal about his medical history), he stopped. The article is all about the event, but it got me thinking about the complexity of living in a world where our professional and personal lives find a collision point on Facebook. When is it no longer ok to be yourself on the Internet? Is that a generational issue or is it a reality of public life?

I personally like to believe that the Generation-Y types (of which I have been informed I am apparently not one) will care less about the humanity (read: fallenness or flaws) of public figures and focus more on their performance in their public or professional facets, but that is still to be proved out. They are afterall (for better or worse) the first generation to face the question of whether or not the President of the United States could still be the President after getting caught receiving oral sex in the oval office. Regardless of what one thinks of the man or the event or the rightness or wrongness of it happening where it did, it strikes me as a fairly significant event in the information age.

Anyway, enjoy the read if you click through...



On a religious note, this topic got me wondering if the wisdom literature of the Old Testament has anything to say about this topic. I don't know yet, but rest assured that if it does, I'll report back.

Cheers - cause I'm so British,
tango