Lost Website

I have been a Twitter user for nearly one year now. It has been an generally pleasant experience. Microblogging is now part of my array my information tools, which also include: RSS (through Google Reader), Email, IRC. A more complete post about own I see Twitter as useful is something I need to do eventually.

I have recently made my Twitter page protected due to the rampant increase in the prevalence of spamming on Twitter. Doing this has bought me peace of mind, but it is pretty unfortunate that Twitter privacy is an all-or-nothing option. If you want keep spammers away from your profile, you need to set your profile to protected and you have no other options. A protected account has the following restriction:

1. People that want to follow you need to be approved
2. Your tweets don’t appear on search.twitter.com
3. “@replies” to user not following you will not be seen
4. You cannot share direct links to your tweet with others

For Twitter outsiders, it is interesting to know that, on Twitter, spammers are not like the obscure, badly worded email that sometimes slip through your email spam filter. A mom an pop plumbing shop hunting potential clients using keywords on Twitter search is also considered to be spamming, admittedly to a lesser level. Some people will call this marketing but it’s a pretty thin line between that a really spamming, especially if the shop is located in the central US where it’s unlikely I’ll ever end up travelling.

The third limitation is what has annoyed me the most about protecting my profile. I follow several people that have good reasons not to follow me and yet I would like to sometimes directly address those persons. For this purpose, I had to create another unprotected account. This is not unpractical as long as your Twitter client supports multiple Twitter account.

It seems to me that those problems would not happen if the privacy options were more fine-grained. I don’t need the full protection of a protected profile, but there are some features of it I can’t live without. Here is how I would split the privacy options.

Visibility

This would determine if only followers can see your tweets. If the user decides that his tweets are private then its of course the should not be searchable.

Followability

It should be possible to screen people that want to follow you on Twitter. Most people I have seen using a protected profile will accept being followed by just any human being, and just the fact of making the profile protected puts it out of reach of majority of spammers.

I understand why this is a feature reserved to protected accounts: if your tweets are public and searchable, then whoever really wants to follow you can do it manually without adding you to their followers list. So, without making the profile private, this option is next to useless to protect keep your profile away from spammers.

Still, there is nothing keeping Twitter from making this feature available independently of private profile. Weeding out your Followers page of the many spammers that stitches to any unprotected profile is something know to all Twitter users and it’s not a fun task if you ever forget it for a few months.

Searchability

Some users might not want their profile to be found on search.twitter.com. I simply don’t need that level of privacy, but it’s not unconceivable that some particular users of Twitter would want to be of the public view.

@replies to you

This would determine if you want to messages directly addressed to you from users you don’t follow. Since Twitter already has a Block feature which does that on an user per user basis, this would be like automatically blocking all users.

This could be useful for star Twitter users with little tons of followers that want to limit who can address them. Most of those people probably don’t read all those tweets anyway, so why give people the illusion they can talk to them?

This of course would be of no use to me since there is just not enough people sending me tweets.

@replies to others

This would determine if want your @replies to be automatically public. This would allow you to communicate with people You want.

This is of particular interest with low-rank Twitter user like me who just want to send messages to Twitter microcelebrities that have few enough fan to read what they say to them and that sometimes might even reply.

Findability

Since we are into adding privacy levels, why not put that in too? Some users might not want to be found using the Twitter “Search User” feature. A privacy setting could be added to disable that.

I’m proposing this just because I thought of it… The Twitter Search User page is pretty crappy and already ensure a base level of privacy which suits me fine.

Explicitely public tweets?

I think most of the problems I have with Twitter privacy settings would be solved if tweets could be made public on an individual basis. It would then be possible to address directly people that don’t follow you and take part in your favorite meme without leaving the comfy cloak of your protected account.

I must say that I have not checked what other microblogging platforms, like Jaiku and identi.ca have to offer. I admit that what I’m suggesting in this post might already exists somewhere else.