Twitter in Plain English

It's worth thinking a bit about how celebrities are beginning to exploit Twitter.  Here are a few screenshots from Stephen Fry's Twitter.

In chronological sequence, beginning with his first tweet:

How many followers does he have now?  And how we do know it is him (clue: see how John Cleese has offered the same way of verifying his Twitter is really him?)?  Answer.  Faking identity on Twitter is going to happen — and has.

By the way: the team behind Blogger has just started using Twitter; some MPs use Twitter; and some members of Congress do, too. Oh, and The White House — or is it?

Finally, Twitter has been noticed by traditional media (newspapers, TV, radio): for a recent example, see Janis Krums' tweet and the photo he took; then look here.  Yahoo is now using Twitter to filter the news.

2)  Passwords

You should find out more about Google Profiles:

About profiles:  A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. It allows you to control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. You have control over what others see. Your profile won't display any private information unless you've explicitly added it. You can also allow people to find you more easily by enabling your profile to be searched by your name. Simply set your existing profile to show your full name publicly.

You can get to your profile directly, or via (for example) Google Reader:

Go to your shared items page and there you'll see that you probably don't yet have an activated Google Profile.  If you click on the option to create one (you can always cancel the process in a moment), you come to this:

Pay particular attention to the Contact Info tab:

You can read more about this here. You should!

Where else on the web do you think you have a profile? If you use Windows Live, what about Windows Live profiles?

Prep: In a recent book, Born Digital, the authors wrote:

… let's look at the digital dossier of a hypothetical baby: we'll call him Andy.

Andy's digital life begins well before he is born — before he even has a name., The first entry in his digital file is a sonogram that his proud parents-to-be affix to the refrigerator, anticipating the happy event of his birth. That same image is recreated in the hospital's database, the first formal record of Andy's life. With the shift from analog to digital, it has become cheap and easy to make a copy of just about any file. Any image or video file or sound file can be copied and stored at almost no marginal cost. In this case, with good reason, the obstetrician's team will copy Andy's image into a file for the pediatrician who will care for him after he's born. Start counting: that's one digital file, copied in at least four places.

These digital files mark the first contributions to Andy's digital dossier. Even before he is born, Andy's digital dossier exists in four places: at home, at the obstetrician's office, at the hospital where he is destined to be born, and in his pediatrician's office files. In each instance, the file is surrounded by different contextual information that will govern how it is used and whether it makes a difference, somehow, in Andy's life. The development of Andy's digital dossier — and to some extent his identity, too — is already held in multiple hands, out of his control and out of his parents' control.