Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I had no idea people took the Internet so seriously.

Here are some large chunks of an "emerging technologies librarian" blog about her (?) Twitter account getting dumped:

from Part 1:
Now, some folk are scared - many people are worried that they'll be next.
Really, folk, we are not bad people! We are people who love (or loved) Twitter - Twitter evangelists! I teach about Twitter, I present about it at conferences, I have slideshows in Slideshare about it, I blog about. How can I honestly try to persuade administrators to make use of Twitter for marketing and community outreach when stuff like this happens, the response time is poor, and even if they are working on fixing the problem, they don't TELL US WHAT IS GOING ON?

Worst of all, I'd been complaining for weeks that I wanted to back up my twitterstream and archive my data, but they were limiting access and blocking the archive. I need my archive. I need a way to get at it. And now it has been deleted. Without warning, without discussion, without consent.

and an Epilogue:
During the time my Twitter account was blocked, I found myself scrambling to learn and use a number of alternate tools that had been recommended widely on Twitter. I had already created accounts in many, but hadn't taken the time to figure them out and learn how to use them. I hadn't needed them, and was happy the way things were. Well, that changed, in a hurry. If I had already been actively using FriendFeed, Ping, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca I might not have been so stressed.

I don't know what to say about people who have become addicted to their social networking software: "If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?" I have a Twitter account which I rarely use; if it stopped loving me, I don't think I'd notice much.

And this whole talk of archiving your communication; I don't think anyone should ever take for granted that the Internet will ever do anything to make your live easier. Different, yeah, but not easier. As you can see, by how much worry and effort someone will apply to something that stops working.

This is why I don't get involved with social networking; I'm still not convinced that I do anything that anyone needs to know about.