Eh, I need to write right?

For the lack of anything interesting to write, I recently started to use Twitter and I have been thinking about the service. (Apparently, as was @botchagalupe with a post about about being a 'twidiot'.

You have got to love the Internet for it's influence in making up words. For instance, my oldest son recently coined the term "traumacational" during a discussion about biology (birds-n-bees ya know) he says "Dad, thanks, really, that was both traumatizing and educational at the same time, it was traumacational, now can we talk about something else please?"

But I digress, I have mixed feelings about the service ('Twitter', if I've lost you), it is both a serious time-sink, informative, and addictive. I am both fascinated with it, and embarrassed by it.

A co-worker sent me a link about WOZ jumping ship to fusionio and I jokingly replied with "bah I saw that on twitter days ago!" his reply which mildly stung, ""Twitter" sounds like a place 13-year old girls go to chat about Pokemon and boy bands." I have to admit though that through the marketing and PR stuff, I have managed to find some very cool sites. Which then reminded me of an Andy Rooney quote: "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done."

But, many of the links are fantastic, and the conversations while often one sided are interesting. That is IF you connect with the right people, and I have saved so many links that I haven't been able to spend any meaningful amount of time looking at them.

So my twittering (there it is again, modifying made up words) was scratching at something in the back of my noggin, and it finally dawned on me what it was. It's MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) chat without the game. I played EQ for years, and there would be a certain amount of people that only seemed to chat in the game, which is likely why Second Life is popular (I imagine, never tried it), well Twitter seems to mimic the many open windows, multiple conversations, direct tells, and secret replies that gamers become prolific at while gaming a MMO.

Interestingly enough, I have found a significant population of computer security people, which fascinates me because here they are updating to everyone with all kinds of information, most of it meaningless, but there are patterns of behavior, sites, and locations, which made an important distinction for me that security is not necessarily privacy. As a friend said earlier when I pointed this out (and I badly paraphrase), "While one facilitates the other, there are not mutually exclusive or dependent." Maybe this is an old subject, but I don't remember reading anything that specifically calls the subject out in this way.

Its definitely not a new concern by any means, one of the responses to @botachagalupes post is that the commenter's twitter posts are private so someone won't go rob his house in Cali when he's boarding an airplane to London, etc. But there is a very large group of people that link everything, linkedin profiles, blogs, jobs, GPS locations, etc. it's amazing.

Well, just another nugget to swish around in my brain for awhile, I guess.