The Connected Web

A while back, my birthday happened to coincide with a business trip, and in between meetings I found a quiet corridor to take a call from my family. After hanging up, I decided to post something about it on Twitter. But as I started forming the tweet in my head, I started to question the wisdom of doing so. My birth date, I reasoned, is one of the data points my bank uses to verify my identity. Did I really want to broadcast that information out onto a medium that's openly searchable? No, I didn't. I never sent that tweet.

Similarly, I avoid posting detailed information about my movements — I recently took off with the family for an extended weekend away, but I didn't announce our absence from home on Twitter. Unfortunately, no such considerations held back Twitter user Israel Hyman, whose online video business, IzzyVideo.com, has over 2,000 followers on Twitter. As USA Today reports in this Associated Press story:

"Israel Hyman and his wife Noell went on Twitter to share real-time details of a recent trip. Their posts said they were 'preparing to head out of town', that they had 'another 10 hours of driving ahead', and that they 'made it to Kansas City'. While they were on the road, their home in Mesa, Arizona, was burglarized."

According to the report, wife Noell believes it was just a coincidence, but Hyman thinks it might have been someone tipped off by his tweet stream, as the thieves only took his video-editing equipment. At least the loss was insured, but it's a salutary warning of the unintended consequences of sharing your life online. By the way, it's not only Twitter that could have adverse side-effects. CNET's Elinor Mills links the Hymans story to a Wired article that notes the potential dark side of geo-locating gizmos:

"Did I really want to tell the world that I was out of town?" wrote Mathew Honan. "Because the card in my camera automatically added location data to my photos, anyone who cared to look at my Flickr page could see my computers, my spendy bicycle, and my large flatscreen TV all pinpointed on an online photo map. Hell, with a few clicks you could get driving directions right to my place — and with a few more you could get black gloves and a lock pick delivered to your home."

There's something about the online world that often makes us less wary than perhaps we should be. Former Google engineer Nelson Minar highlights an interesting flipside of this in a blog post yesterday on Social capital and online games. He writes that he recently quit playing World of Warcraft after three years of pretty intensive play: "playing intimately with 25 people ten or more hours a week, learning to work together, handling personal conflicts, etc." In that time he got to know a lot of people but only one or two have become friends:

"It's not just how well we know each other (all that time together!), it's that our friendship is virtual ... But I've got lots of real friendships from other online communities ... I think the difference with online games is that the experience is mediated via an avatar. To my WoW friends I'm not Nelson, I'm Flyv the bear druid (rawr!)."

The relationships we build online can look and feel like real-world relationships, but they're not. They need some extra dimension to become real, and until we add that real-world dimension, they retain an element of illusion. Unfortunately, the more we add those real-world details into our online personae, the more potential there is for an unscrupulous participant to exploit that vulnerability. Maybe that's why Facebook, which starts from who you know, has gained more traction globally than Twitter. The online world can only work if it's rooted in the real world.