When I post my “status” on twitter or facebook I think of it as more private than a blog post. Perhaps private isn’t the perfect word here, but fewer people can see my status updates since I have my privacy set such that we have to agree to be friends on twitter or facebook. Not that I’d write anything remotely scandalous nor do I consider it secure, just a nice way to keep up with friends and acquaintances in a more informal way.

When I post something on my blog I feel like there are a lot of facebook contacts that wouldn’t know about it, and when I post a picture on Flickr or a video to youtube nearly everyone is in the dark unless I announce it, which I generally don’t bother to do.

The new FriendFeed service is one way to solve this problem, but I’d rather link up my existing services than join another one, so here’s what I’ve done:

Status: Facebook / Twitter – My twitter status updates get pushed to facebook. This was a pretty crucial link since they ask for the same kind of status updates. I used the TwitterSync facebook app.

Blog Posts: Blog / Facebook / Twitter – My blog now sends a link to new posts over to twitter which sends it to facebook. I used the Twitter Tools wordpress plugin.

Bookmarks: del.icio.us / Blog / Facebook – Once a day if I’ve posted public links they will go from del.icio.us to my blog’s feed, and to facebook’s mini-feed. I use feedburner to add the bookmarks to my feed and del.icio.us’s facebook integration in del.icio.us settings. I haven’t found an app to add them to twitter.

Photos: Flickr / Twitter / Facebook / Blog – When I upload a new photo on Flickr with the twitter tag a link goes to my twitter / facebook status. That way if I want to upload a bunch of photos to flickr they don’t have to create 20 tweets, nice flexibility. I used FlickrToTwitter. I also have a flickr badge on my blog.

Videos: Youtube / ? – I rarely upload videos, but it would be nice if there were a tool out there that could update my status with a link when I did. I haven’t found an automated way to do this yet.

OK, so FriendFeed would have been a lot easier, but I didn’t have to ask anyone to join anything.

I’d be interested to hear how other people manage these kinds of audience issues. I’m actually presenting a paper about this sort of thing in October, but more on that later.

The following quote is from the article Definition Changes for People’s Privacy in the Guardian quoting Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence.

Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs.

I think that statement is a pretty good research question rather than a statement of fact. I haven’t seen any research on this particular point. I think the issue is finding out whether young people have always had a different attitude about privacy than their elders (I think Sennett addresses this in The Fall of Public Man) or if today’s young people are actually different – and, more importantly, why? It’s easy to see how one might become fatalistic about privacy with projects like this location tracking system that can be put together ad-hoc.

It’s interesting to see that kind of thing making headlines. A couple weeks ago Joe Turow from U. Penn. Annenberg gave a talk at our department and these kinds of surveillance issues were part of what he talked about. From that discussion and other things I’ve read I don’t think the list will have much of an impact on the larger trends that have created the desire for such a list, but it’s good that this issue has made its way into public discussion.

This feature is quite like Onlife, which I tried out but didn’t end up buying because while it’s very interesting to know that I average less than a minute per web page I visit, I really don’t know what to do with that information. The history of searches on Google is interesting, and maybe once in a blue moon it will be useful but it doesn’t keep even google scholar searches let alone my library catalogue and database queries – which would be quite useful.

Then of course there’s the privacy issues. Google knows my name, everyone I email, all of my searches, and where I live & most new places I go (google maps). Combined with all the other companies – credit bureaus – not to mention the NSA – there is an incredible amount of detailed information out there about me, and nearly everyone else in the developed world. I’m really ambivalent about it. In one sense it’s very Foucauldian in that we willingly enable those who dominate us etc., but in another sense all this privacy we supposedly had was not some sort of natural state of being. When people lived in small bands everyone knew everything about everybody else and our modern notions about privacy are just that – although it was more or less bilateral in the band situation and not so much with the corporate relationships today. I’d say a good situation would be if the data were open – not just so that I can see and correct my own information, but also some aggregate trends as much as possible.