How to microblog in high heels

Not many people know of the service Twttr - but its 3rd birthday today is no cause for celebration.

Twttr allows you to send and receive Twitter messages via text. The first half is nothing new or additional to the already existent Twitter service, the second however is a the ugly alien baby which should never have been born out onto mother Twitter.

Some may argue ostensibly for the service, which does allow you to turn off alerts from certain friends. But, really, who can justify even just the concept of being contact by mobile phone when your friends decides to have a shower, or a colleague posts a mildy-amusing web video.

As someone who uses Twitter mainly professionally to network and find links to interesting pieces of journalism, I am slightly disgusted by the idea of having my personal mobile phone, the closest thing we have to a private piece of technology (does anyone know Obama’s mobile number?), to suddenly become intricately connected to the social networking scene. Networking is great on the web, it truely is – you can chit chat like you would at networking parties and build useful contacts. Networking should not happen on as personal a level as the mobile phone.

As one commentator puts it:

i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”…i find it interesting such an annoying feature is supposedly causing viral growth…i’m done developing social software if the key to success is to be intrusive

What’s more on the level of privacy – all Twttr messages are put onto the user’s Twttr webpage – for all to see. This, of course, takes out the personal element Twttr was trying to implement into Twitter – cancelling out itself in a bizarre sort of private/non-private cross contamination.

Privacy concerning new Internet applications has been tossed up in the media waves this week with Google Street causing uproar among human rights activists.

Despite the fact Street View does cross some pretty thick privacy lines by capturing a number of hapless individuals puking and peeing in public – for all on the web to see without their consent.

But Street View helped me today when before turning up for work experience I checked Street View, without which I would not have recognised South Wales Evening Post’s unmistakable blue building (below).

Google has spent the week clearing a number of images off the sight – quite right too – who would want to be captured unwillingly sauntering back to the office looked pleased with a lady not his wife (cough, Ruaridh Nicoll, cough). But at least those idiots on Google’s streets didn’t voluntarily put up pictures of them going about day-to-day business. Which is a lot more than you can say for the naive lot brandishing their whereabouts on Twttr by text – and receiving updates in the process.