Collab-Or-Ate

The general upset about Google Buzz is interesting to me. One of the objections I’ve read is that email is always private and status messages are always public and never the two shall meet. It is wrong to mix these two types of communication.

What I find really interesting about this argument is that there are no fundamental truths about how online communication must happen. Why is email private? Because it has been since the 70’s? Why are status message public? Because that is twitter’s default setting? Status messages can be private (e.g. protected tweets) and emails could be public (maybe that’s what blogs are). These private/public distinctions are pretty arbitrary in my mind. Sure, I assume that the email I send today is private because that is how my email software behaves today, but I can imagine email environments that don’t operate this way.

Google also has enough market share and influence that the way they design their applications can fundamentally change how we think about email and status messages. If Buzz takes off, we may look back a few years from now and have trouble remembering that there used to be a clear distinction between emails and status messages. It is all just communication with our network after all.

Since I know my blog readers are sophisticated social media users and don’t need advice on this topic, this is only of marginal interest, but I’m quoted in this article on How to Decline Facebook Friends Without Offence.