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Involuntary Mindcasting and some reasons behind Twitter Protected Updates

Can you imagine involuntary mindcasting? Most likely all accounts would be protected; probably Twitter wouldn’t exist at all…

Recently I sent a mail to over 200 twitters inside Microsoft asking why we were using an e-mail alias instead of a protected account for sharing experiences. The first answer was Why would anyone use a Protected Updates?

Well, some of the discussed outcome:

  • Context: Decrease Noise. People may not want to try to craft tweets to address different contexts and it’s easier to control the context than the interpretation.  Example: mommy-Tweeters who want to write about trials and tribulations of parenting and assume that everyone who is reading understands the dramas of new motherdom.
  • Privacy. Wives of persons with high visibility on certain communities, e.g. Miguel de Icaza’s wife https://twitter.com/marialaura – to carefully validate access. This also effectively helps avoid spam bots. And clearly you can use it to share non-public information. Beware, because there are reports on a false sense of security.
  • Automation. You can create a private account and set automated actions. While there are more reliable messaging systems the multi-channel or multi-headed model can be interesting for consumer oriented applications.
  • Internal communications. For those that do not have e-mail culture, use the same tool for communication when a lot of the workforce is mobile. Going Where the People are at.
  • Live training. where you want only to keep dialog with a group of probably less than 30 attendees during a specific time period. Enter the real time web.

I’m sure you can contribute more valid reasons for leveraging twitter unprotected updates. Can you?

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