What is Twitter (to me)?

I often come across people who say that they understand the point of Twitter. Given the fact that I am an active twitter user (according to Overskrift.dk, I am among the 500 most active and 500 most followed Danish twitter users), I thought I'd try to explain how I use twitter, and why it's not just the same as facebook statuses or instant messaging.

Before continuing, I should probably make clear that I am in no way any kind of communications expert, or even particular knowledgeable on the subjects of digital communication, social media, and social networks.

Having said all that, let's go into how I view Twitter.

For me, Twitter is a great media for social dialogue. It's not just someone telling me something, but rather a continuous conversation, with multiple entrance points and nearly unlimited participants. This can be a intimidating at first, but as soon as you realize that you can do it on your own premises, it works for you.

Let's try to see how a conversation usually get going.

1) Somebody posts something
2) Multiple people either re-tweets the post (sometimes adding their own comments)
3) People react to either the original tweet or a re-tweet.
4) People respond to the responders
etc.

The great thing about this is that you don't have to have been part of the conversation from the start - you can just jump in at any point, and add your view to the conversation (or reinforce somebody else view by re-tweeting).

Given the fact that you can only see tweets addressed at other people if you also follow that person, the conversation can also be a bit fractured, but at this point, twitter users have found out how to work around this (adding a dot in front of the tweet if it might be of general interest).

I hope you can see why this is different from both facebook statuses, where only a limited group of people can see it/participate in the conversation, and instant messaging, which are even more limited.

This is what makes Twitter more interesting for me.

Still, it wasn't always like that. I have been using twitter since the end of 2008, or thereabouts, but I didn't really start actively using it until summer last year. The reason I didn't use it so much before then, was that I had a hard time figuring out how to use the media so it worked for me.

So, what changed?

1) First and foremost, I got past a critical mass of people I follow. This means that there are always some kind of conversation going on, which I can dip into, if I feel like it.
2) Closely related, I learned that I don't have to read all tweets. My usage of twitter is to log in, and read the tweets on the screen. I generally don't scroll back, though if someone post a reply to someone else, which catches my interest, I will generally try to trace the conversation back.
3) I learned to ignore the fact that people don't react to my replies to their tweets. It's important to remember that at the time they read them, they have moved on in their conversation. Also, unlike , people get to pick and choose what conversations they want to participate in, without being considered rude.

I cannot stress the last point enough. It's not rude not to engage in a conversation on Twitter - instead it's rude to insist on a conversation. If people don't feel up to communicating with you, then look for a conversation somewhere else.

Hopefully, this post has made it a little clearer what Twitter can be used for. Keep in mind, however, that Twitter is different things for different people - some people use it to talk with their friends, other people use it as a sort of RSS feed, keeping an eye for interesting links being posted, and yet other people use the media entirely differently.

On an end note, just remember that because of Twitter's nature, you can't tell where your tweets will end up and who will read them. So, as in everything on the internet, think before you post.

Privacy in social networks

Like so many other people using the internet, I use several social networks (LinkedIn, facebook, MySpace, Twitter, flickr), which means that I have a social profile on the internet. My social profile on the internet is fairly public, but many people prefer to make themselves more anonymous while using these social networks (through the options provided by these social networks).

Many people, myself included, have had some doubts about whether it was really possible to have privacy while being on a social network. We no longer need to doubt this - we can now say for sure that it doesn't really know. A recent study which will be presented at IEEE Security & Privacy '09 has demonstrated that it's possible to de-anonymize social networks by using the data that the networks sell to advertisers and make public on the internet.

The study is described in Technology review

Unmasking Social-Network Users

Researchers find a way to identify individuals in supposedly anonymous social-network data.

What was studied was whether it was possible to use the data that social networks sell, where personal identifiers have been removed, together with public available data (accessible from the internet), and connect the sold data to actual people.

The actual study is available on the internet here: De-anonymizing Social Networks.

As the abstracts clearly states, the experiment was fairly successful.

Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc.

We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized social-network graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12% error rate.

Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy "sybil" nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary's auxiliary information is small.

The results are worrisome even for people like me who is fairly public on the internet. Since these data are sold to advertisers, it means that the social networks unwittingly provides them with personal information about me and my friends, even if they explicitly say that they won't do that.

The good things about this study is that the problem is now out in the open, and that there now is a framework for testing the privacy of social networks.