An interesting time for the twitter conversation talk:

http://twitter.com/codinghorror/statuses/757351162

Hey Now Jeff,
Some communications sure do have limitations. I'm surprised your a big fan of Twitter.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

I get that your point is about the efficacy of communication over IM / email / etc. However, I don't think a conversation in Twitter is inexcusable when Twitter's so full of "I'm eating a sandwich, yummy!" interjections, anyways.

One thing you don't catch in the above snippet is that the discussion did come to a productive end. I felt that all participants profited from the discussion, and it was interesting from my point of view (mostly watching, chiming in occasionally). Folks watch political debates on TV, why not software development debates on Twitter?

Yeah, I'm with you. Back when I first joined Twitter I railed against people using it as "the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC EVER". That's only escalated over time, especially once Twitter formalized the @name convention.

Well, at least nobody's figured out an efficient means of spamming Twitter. Yet.

I wrote some IM etiquette guidelines a while back, Forbes picked up on them, you can find them here:

http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/22/leadership-bizbasics-messaging-cx_tvr_0822bizbasics.html

I've gotten into a few arguments with my wife because something I wrote in an email as a joke wasn't preceived as a joke by my wife.

With any written medium, there's no way to ensure that the reader understands what you wrote the way you intended it. With the phone or in person, you can at least tell from their body language or the way they say something whether they understand you or not.

Wish I had learned sooner, so I could had a few less arguments with my wife.

twitter?

I hope Ralph Nader can be successful in pushing whoever is nominated to be accountable for their promises of change, but alas the media will continue to label him a "spoiler" and ignore what he represents to those who choose to vote for him out of disgust at the alternatives. Democracy is not free and the democrats aren't gonna get a free ride out of Nader.

The discussion in question never resorted to name calling or trollish actions, so what criteria would you use for whether a debate should move from Twitter? Is it length?

I definitely am glad you raise this point, because new forms of communications will naturally settle into new rules of etiquette for communicating in those mediums.

What I find interesting is that you yourself escalated a Twitter conversation to your blog, without even a heads-up to me offline. What is the general etiquette on that?

Sure, Twitter is technically public, but there are varying degrees of public as we learned from the first Facebook fiasco. I only have 300 or so followers in Twitter, which is where the conversation would've most likely stayed, but now it's on a blog with thousands and thousands of readers.

In any case, I am still searching Amazon for my "Miss Manners on Twitter" book. ;)

I disagree with your hierarchy. I switch to IM when email becomes inadequate, not the other way around. I switch to email when facebook messages and text messages become inadequate.

This clip must be old. Twitter has adjusted their feeds and you shouldn't see a one-sided conversation anymore. If you don't follow the target of an @name, it should be hidden from you now.

And I would argue the exact opposite needs to take place. Why rely on voice conversations that can't be easily recorded, required synchronized, offer no ability for hyperlinking, attaching, or embedding and don't offer a paper trail. For all of these reasons email (and to a slightly lesser degree IM) are superior. What holds us back is people's inability to type or to learn proper etiquette, both of which should be rectified by schools, places of work, and colleagues.

> What I find interesting is that you yourself escalated a Twitter conversation to your blog, without even a heads-up to me offline. What is the general etiquette on that?

Public is public. I doubt anyone can even follow the conversation in this format, which was kind of my point. I couldn't. It'd be better as a forum topic or-- dare I say-- a blog post?

> I disagree with your hierarchy.

That's perfectly fine. If you're *aware* of the hierarchy and the pros and cons of each method, then you're ahead of most. Put them in whatever order you like.

> because something I wrote in an email as a joke wasn't preceived as a joke by my wife.

Adding six different smiley variations didn't work? :) =8)

One of the problems with things like IM and twitter is that you can't easily communicate emotion and you sure can't communicate tone or body language at all. Many a time have I offended a good freind and been offended by a good friend when it could have been resolved over a 30 second call or talk.

I've got to agree with haacked... I don't follow either of these twitters, it felt a lot like you were airing their personal communications. Just from reading it, I felt a bit embarrassed.

The analogy that came to me was hearing someone arguing with someone on a cell phone. Etiquette suggests you don't turn to a third party to discuss the conversation.

This is not to say there's something wrong with what you did, but I assume you consider haacked to be at least a peer. So it might be good to at least acknowledge that others might not agree with your cavalier "public is public" statement.

I think this article might have had a better feel if the twitters you showed were your own.

LOL! Some of you dudes complaining about Atwood posting a *public conversation* on his blog need to grow a set of balls and stop crying like little girls. If Bellware and Haacked had a set of blog posts doing this rather than Twittering back and forth would there be as much of an issue!!

Sheesh, man up already.

This is an actual, permanent shift (and some would argue for the worse) in social engineering.

At one office I worked at I refused (and still do) to use IM. I would sit at a co-workers desk trying to reason thru some technical details, and they were forever interrupted by little IM boxes lighting up. No train of thought!

My son recently had coffee with someone who could NOT sit and talk without using her phone to text people constantly.

Just as we lose the ability to retain coherent handwriting due to keyboards, we are losing the ability to converse -- and we avoid conversing -- by using email, IM, etc. instead.

What year "THX 1138"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138

There is indeed a level of privacy, if not intimacy, that informs what a twitter poster might write. I know that my circle of followers is listening. There's an intimacy in that.

There's nothing technically wrong, per se, with re-posting a twitter conversation on a mechanism with higher visibility because we accept the accessibility of the medium. Although the justifiability of this blog post - for me at least - feels like something akin to posting photos snapped at a public nude beach.

There's always a risk that the conventional intimacy of a social circle will be eschewed by someone with a motive to publish its content outside of its inherent context, but the amenability of the medium to this kind of action doesn't justify the action.

It also strikes me as a really cowardly thing to do. Phil and I had the stones to stick to this debate and have it in the open, for all it's worth, to talk this issue through, and to provide a window into the negotiation of mean to folks in our respective circles. You added nothing, and you're only action was parasitic.

So, you've got every right to regurgitate twitter conversations, but it's only a *technical* right. Your moral claim to the act is spurious.

To my experience, you only seem to be interested in comfy cozy human factors, which isn't where the paradigm-changing work is done.

You want twitter to be a certain thing and a certain way. I appreciate your feed of interesting links, etc, but twitter ins't that one thing to everyone, and you've got little call to attempt to skew perceptions here to try make it so.

If you don't like conversations on twitter, and if the folks who don't like twitter conversations that you quoted don't like twitter conversations, then read something else. If our negotiations of meaning are getting in the way of folks finding the next link to something funny on YouTube, well, I make no apologies whatsoever.

The realm of human factors encompasses much more than the focus of your interests in the field.

Have to agree with Steve (for the worse) - this is like what we call Crackberries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry Some people are so addicted (or is that afflicted?) that they just can't help themselves - must.. reach.. for.. crack...berry ahhhhhh. So why not add yet another addiction to increase our ADD in our social networking communication. Maybe I am old school - I could never understand the functional purpose of twitter.

>> I disagree with your hierarchy.

> That's perfectly fine. If you're *aware* of the hierarchy and the pros and cons of each method, then you're ahead of most. Put them in whatever order you like.

Actually, this is tangentially related to some research I'm doing.

Older people are digital immigrants and have lived most of their lives with only a few communication modes (face to face, phone, letter, word of mouth, maybe email) so they regard each mode as a seperate thing for which they have to learn the appropriate way to use.

Younger people who are digital natives grew up with their choices of communication modes constantly expanding (email, text messaging, conference calling, video conferencing, usenet, forums, blogs, poking, twittering and on and on...) so they are much more focused on building generative models from which they can derive the rules for any communication medium.

It's this cognitive shift that makes it so hard for both sides to see the other's mode of work. Digital natives are multimodal and shift seamlessly (if not always appropriately) between different channels and use channels based on the task at hand. Digital immigrants struggle to follow and end up making numerous social gaffes which keeps them tied down to what they already know.

Here's something I wrote about this phenomena:

"For people under a certain age, [multimodal communication] is something that's totally natural to them and each medium is a tool used for a specific purpose. I'll post a note on facebook about a concert, email you the link to the band's website, instant message you
to figure out where we're going to meet up, text message to ask why you're running late, meet up with you face to face to attend, call you up afterwards to talk about how much it rocked and then post the pictures up on my facebook profile and tag you the next day."

More proof that Scott Bellware is a pompus jacakss, as if his blog didn't provide enough evidence of that already.

Twitter to me seems to be the ultimate manifistation of narcacism. Do twitterers feel that the noise they generate adds value to the cloud?

Right now I'm typing.
Now I'm about to review the text of this post.
Now I'm debating the part where I call Bellware a pompus jacakass.
Now I'm deciding to leave it in.
Now I'm clicking Post.

>Right now I'm typing.
>Now I'm about to review the text of this post.
>Now I'm debating the part where I call Bellware a pompus jacakass.
>Now I'm deciding to leave it in.
>Now I'm clicking Post.

wow, if your twitters are exactly that. I'm glad you're not twittering.

Jeff... when I first started reading your blog I found it informative and helpful.

Over the past few months I have found it to be more and more trite. It's as though you're writing for the sake of it, placing more emphasis on controversy and less on being... helpful. What is this blog about, really? Is this going to improve people or technology on the whole?

For that matter, what is this about code not being beautiful. Who friggin' cares? What purpose does it server to argue over such things?

For the love of (insert deity here), would you please get back to writing more pragmatic pieces and less tripe? You're becoming the Fox News of tech blogs...

It's best to think of Twitter as a tuner or a browser in that the value depends on who you watch. Most television is stupid, but some shows are worthwhile. Most websites are stupid, but I'd be lost without the intarwebs. The value of Twitter comes from the people - and the conversations - that you follow.

Scott Bellware: "To my experience, you only seem to be interested in comfy cozy human factors, which isn't where the paradigm-changing work is done."

I hate to disagree, but it's _all_ human factors. Who do you think picks the paradigms? In a less general sense, human factors is where the most work needs to be done in computing, because right now we suck at it.

"So, you've got every right to regurgitate twitter conversations, but it's only a *technical* right. Your moral claim to the act is spurious."

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you want to claim any sort of control over the "privacy", or format, or context, of your communications, _don't put them on the freakin' web_. The web works by making connections. His "moral claim" isn't spurious, it's fundamental.

OK, I'll confess I was lying when I said I hate to disagree. In this case it's more of a compulsion.

For me, since my organization's staff is geographically dispersed, I typically go from top to bottom:
Forums / collaborative discussion board of your choice
E-mail / IM
IM (preferably with voice and video)

As Jeff wrote, I find that the most important thing to keep in mind is the limitation of each medium. In one case, after I discovered someone couldn't use voice over IM, we agreed to only talk about certain topics at a time of day when we were both very awake to minimize misunderstandings.

At the risk of being filtered as spam, here's a fun, somewhat (but barely) relevant comic - http://www.xkcd.com/386/

> public is public

My point is, Privacy is not a boolean. I think danah covers it well here:

http://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookAndPrivacy.html

Etiquette isn't about the right or wrong of an action, but rather about courtesy as a means of maintaining social harmony and trust.

If you overheard a loud fight between me and my wife in a public place, I wouldn't expect you to post about it on your blog and cavalierly respond "Public is public", though it's well within your right.

In any case, I think this discussion is valuable in that it reminded me just how comfortable we can become with such technologes that we forget about their privacy implications from day to day. It's a phenomena well known among documentarians and reality TV casts as the subjects of such films forget about the cameras.

I've turned off the public setting for my tweets. As you point out, it's really no big deal in this particular case. No ill feelings here. Nothing but love for you Jeff! ;)

I have a slightly different perspective, in that my wife and I have been known to de-escalate from face-to-face down to IM for discussing some emotionally charged issues. That way nobody gets distracted or reads too much into an expression or a tone of voice. We can focus on the words and what the other person is actually saying, not what we percieve them to be saying.

I've been in Data Processing for over 30 years. The best way to communicate with your peers (or user community) is face-to-face. Don't over rely on email and/or vmail, get your butt up and go down to the persons office (nee cube) and talk. email and vmail tend to make your conversation impersonal, have a personal conversation. You both may learn something. Every day you learn something is a good day. IM is OK chatting with your buddies but when you are in a business environment either talk on the phone or face to face.

"But don't underestimate the power of taking a previously siloed, private one-to-one communication medium and making it public."

Who'd a thunk it.

If no one remembers Usenet news, how come people remember e-mail?

Scott Bellwood said, "...my circle of followers ..."

Hmmm,...

Sorry Gunther, I figured that "circle of followers" would be self-evident in context. "Followers" are part of the twitter vernacular and model. Don't go getting all conspiratorial on me. Nothing meant by it but than to use language from the domain in question.

Yep, I'm a pompous ass who at least has the sense not to sink below dialog and debate into name calling. I welcome you to call me names to my face in person, however.

There are no searchable logs of face to face!

Josh your comment has inspired me. I'll hold it close to my heart until my final resting. In fact, I'm going to obtain a small stone from the great pyramid at giza and have that comment inscribed on it and filled in with solid gold. You truly have "added value to the cloud".

Ah topic: If you don't want people to read your tweet, protect them. Twitter seems to be pretty reliable about not showing people tweets that are protected. Otherwise, treat Twitter just like a blog, because that's what Google does. and post accordingly.

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=@haacked+@sbellware&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

@Collin Cusce

The last time I checked, this was Jeff's blog. He can write about whatever he feels like writing about. If you don't like it then don't come back.

@Rudolf_the_Red

Ha! I see your Nader hijack and raise you a Ron Paul+Howard Dean. Mao will never die! Oh, wait...

What you describe here is the very reason why smileys and emoticons are so useful when it comes to chats an internet forums. ;)

@Scott Bellware and Haacked:
If you discuss something in public - ANY kind of public - you instantly lose the right to call what you have discussed private. You also lose the right to whine or whinge about it.

Jeff took an example of a public discussion on an IM. His point of doing this was not to display nude pictures of either of you but to point to how the communication works in terms of IM. That both of you feel violated ONLY testifies to the size of your egos, NOT to anything about this blog.
You might think that privacy comes in shades, but that's a convenient illusion. Broken down, it IS boolean - and that's all there is to it. Cry as much as you want, things won't change.

In other words: if you're nude and go to a nude public beach, expect to be nude in public visibility. And if you have a problem being nude in public, DON'T DO IT.

Regards
Fake

I got dumped by email...

go figure.

I thought the entire point of having discussions over Twitter was to make sure that all the people that already love (err, 'follow') you can see what a smart guy you are and how you are definitely in the right. If not, why else would you have it on Twitter instead of IM or e-mail?

And God knows Scott just wants to be loved.

"if you're nude and go to a nude public beach, expect to be nude in public visibility."

Does that mean then I can take pictures of you nude, and sell them?

Public instant messaging where anyone can jump in? How is this not a chat room? I'm not understanding the difference between this and a chat room.

IRC has been around for years.

I quite agree with Shalmanese, just use them all in harmony. However, IM is for casual stuff. Debates are done by email, relationship conversations in person or phone...it all depends on the message and what you want to get out of it.
I find it very hard to have some technical discussions face to face, atleast without a way to quickly sketch design processes. There is no 'single' answer for what communication medium fits what sort of discussion.

"I'm not understanding the difference between this and a chat room."

Most new things are just old things done slightly differently.

I think the truly new thing is the general availability of applications that use the technology, rather than the essential ideas. This is what gets a lot of people; it's easy to say "but that's really nothing new". This is accurate, as far as it goes. What's new is either the timing or the marketing is successful enough to cause it to reach a broader and broader audience.

IRC is really a tech-aware chat tool, developed by nerds for nerds...In the days when to be a nerd you had to understand memory management in C. Twitter works because it's more accessible to people.

Similar examples abound. Myspace is, at its essence, a web page authoring tool. It's "geocities" all grown up. But it's more accessible than having to learn how to write HTML, CSS, embed various objects, hunt down little applications, modify install scripts to get them to work, learn how to configure Apache...; AJAX is, in essence, a smart terminal talking to a timeshare system.

These things aren't really producing exciting new solutions to problems, they're marketing old solutions in exciting and accessible new ways. Ebay isn't fundamentally a new idea, it's just a well-done translation of your local flea market to a global scale.

very useful blog.

I'll stay away from inviting anyone to a face to face meeting to discuss whether or not Jeff did the correct thing in posting the twitter...

But as a matter of documentation, I use email as my primary tool for communication with my contractors. They have a convenient way of "forgetting" that they said something or agreed to something. And since none of them will write it down, I will avoid face to face meetings and send email. If I must meet with them f2f, I will followup with an email documenting our conversations.

I would much rather have a personal f2f to experience the conversation and read all the non-verbal cues, but without a documentation trail, I would be up a creek.

Amazing how much faster you get a response when you say, "wait a minute, in the email dated 11/25 you said 'We will be implementing the new security features.'... What changed?" Hard to back out when you can produce time/date stamped documentation and not just handwritten notes.

Scott Bellware -- the more you defend yourself the gayer you sound.

Your whole Twitter stream was a bit psychotic anyways. Why "intelligent" people would use Twitter to discuss something is beyond me.

I would use Twitter for something like this:

"3 beers consumed, all is well"
"8 berrs consumed, I can still spel"
"17 beaf consoomed, it's all suddenly clear 2 me now"

Clearly, knowing the limitations of the medium you're trying to communicate in is necessary, but I think it's wrong to suggest that they fall into a tidy hierarchy, of any kind. Yes, face-to-face communication provides more feedback of the kind that prevents you from taking jokes as sincere (and insulting) statements, but the same feedback can also ramp up emotional issues. Nothing can make you quite as angry as an actual face-to-face argument, at least for me.

Written communication takes more work to craft in the simple cases, such as an ordinary conversation, but also provides more opportunities to craft well. We still turn to essays and books when we really need to get a point across most carefully.

I don't think, IM, cell phone text messages, Face-to-Face or Email are generally interchangeable.
Face-to-Face is great, if the matter to discuss is not yet well-defined, and for collectively approach a definition. It is bad, if you need something written down as a result, be it for the "i said it"-kind of situation, or a "to-do"-List.

Email/Forum is good, if the matter is well-defined, but there are some complicated Points. One is able to think a long time to come to a decision, and say exactly this, precisely, with sources. (And of course you have a proof, if you need one).

I think, it's not about escalating by importance (to me implied by "hierarchy" or "communications A-Bomb"), its more about the fitting tool for the Problem.

@james on February 25, 2008 08:33 PM
"IM is OK chatting with your buddies but when you are in a business environment either talk on the phone or face to face."

In a business environment, phone or face-to-face could be more of a distraction than a valuable form of communication. Whenever your "in the zone" solving a difficult problem, a ringing telephone or your co-worker asking a simple question can cost you on average 20-30 minutes of work, sometimes much more (even if it only takes a minute to respond). Except for issues that must be settled immedately, email is perfect as a distraction-free communication medium.

I got dumped over IM... twice. Well, it started on facebook and migrated to IM the second time.

It's interesting that IT people see face-to-face as the best or most preferable communication medium. Obviously, it dates back to prehistoric times, but for quite some time, simple letter writing was considered the "true" form of "real" conversation. I'm not sure where the shift happened back to face-to-face; perhaps IM/Email etc devalued the written word to this point where we'd rather spend 20 minutes in tangential conversation than write 300 carefully considered words.

@John Ferguson

Nope, nader is on topic. It was on his twitter stream linked in the blog post :P He said "Fuck Nader" so either he doesn't want Nader to run because of the silly assumption that he loses elections for dems, so I wanted to reply to that, but too lazy to sign up for twitter :P
Or possibly he thinks that seat belts are a stupid idea? Either way needs to be set straight...

"There's always a risk that the conventional intimacy of a social circle will be eschewed by someone with a motive to publish its content outside of its inherent context, but the amenability of the medium to this kind of action doesn't justify the action."

We've missed you Scott.

Jeff,

You should have anonymized the conversation. The names of the people who participated in the conversation don't add anything to your argument. And I know that I have been guilty of incorrectly using a particular medium -- and sometimes I still am -- though I have learned to choose the appropriate medium the hard way. My point is that I would not have liked having my conversations (even public conversations) highlighed on a much more public forum when in all likelyhood the conversation is not reflective of my typical character. I hope you go back and anonymize this particular blog and clean previous posts so one cannot easily figure out who the "offender" is.

And while I'm sure that determined people can get on Twitter and find out who participated in the conversation, anonymizing the conversation will make it much less likely that the "offender" will identified by the general public.

@Kevin:

WHO CARES?

Public forum. No different than having a chat room conversation. If Phil and Scott would have had this conversation on two blogs would it have made it any more public? There's no difference whatsoever if I can easily access both.

If it hasn't been stated already, this whole thread of comments is ultimately a testament to Jeff's point. :)

> There's no difference whatsoever if I can easily access both.

Justice~!, the problem I see with your argument is that if the conversation were anonymized by Jeff, then you couldn't easily access the conversation on Twitter.

> WHO CARES?

Justice~!, I'm sure the person who made most of the comments on the Twitter excerpt cares. In fact I know he does, because he has posted his thoughts on this earlier in the comments on this blog.

OK, I just looked around on Twitter. In order to see a conversation, you have to be following one of the people in the conversation. It is possible to set your Twitter account such that not anyone can "follow" you. (One of the two parties in the forementioned Twitter excerpt has that restriction enabled.)

And even if you could follow someone on a conversation, it does not appear easy to find a conversation on Twitter based on the text of the conversation. This lends credance to my assertion that the conversation should have been anonymized.

@ Steven

It is his blog, but I'm letting him know that I, a reader for the past year and a half, am starting to question why I listen to Jeff. He used to be fairly helpful, now he's muckraking. The comments have turned from a mix of gratitude and helpful insights into nothing more than a mid-grade tech forum.

If you like it, continue reading... I'm aware it's his blog, but ... I'm quickly losing interest.

Never ceases to amaze me how willing this community is to degrade exploratory dialog into name calling and to not have the courage to identify themselves.

@Kevin: actually, you're wrong. I knew about this entire row between Scott and Phil two days ago and I follow neither of them. I was simply able to click on certain links. Note in my own blog yesterday I isolated one particular conversation piece of Jeff Atwood's.

In fact, if I'm not able to see that conversation why can I go to:
http://twitter.com/sbellware/

and even subscribe to an RSS feed of his twitters? Again, if Twitter isn't public, why is there an *RSS Feed* of twitters?

I had a friend point me to some of the initial exchange between Scott and Phil. All I needed to do in order to read conversations was effectively connect some dots and read the "in reply to" parts of the conversation.

If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to hear the reasons why.

@Colin: If you do not like reading the blog, simply stop - that's probably the easiest way. I think you are overestimating how important it is that you personally are losing interest.

> Justice~!, I'm sure the person who made most of the comments on the Twitter excerpt cares. In fact I know he does, because he has posted his thoughts on this earlier in the comments on this blog.

I'm also pretty sure that given the history of the person in question this is hardly a surprise. =)

For me, it's all about direct messaging.

Send your twitter status through IM as "d " Or do it through the web interface.. If I'm replying to someone I've just replied to, I try to remember to direct message. If it's someone I know, I'll go ahead and send an IM instead of the direct message.

I'm shocked that NO ONE has mentioned the direct messaging.. It's pretty crucial when you want to reply to someone, but don't want to flood public twitter feeds.

And as to the "knowing when to escalate" point you're making, I think it's a very important point. Especially when you add in all the social networks I have to keep up with. When should I facebook message instead of email? Should this be a wall post? I think this is all part of the netiquette we are all learning.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I put in angle brackets, but he parsed hardcore on the "no html" thing.. they weren't html :(

I meant to say:

[...]
Send your twitter status through IM as "d [user] [message]"
[...]

@Scott Bellware "Never ceases to amaze me how willing this community is to degrade exploratory dialog into name calling and to not have the courage to identify themselves."

Well, maybe if you weren't such a difficult, confrontational, contentious fellow with a bone to pick, people would identify themselves more often.

Jeff exercised some questionable judgement on reposting your conversation, thats true. Your first response addressed your concerns with his usage and that is fine. You then proceeded to poo-poo on his blog with:

"To my experience, you only seem to be interested in comfy cozy human factors, which isn't where the paradigm-changing work is done."

Implying that Jeff's "comfy cozy human factors" take second place to "paradigm-changing work" (which is what I presume is what you're doing) is irrelevant to this discussion. That, was a thinly vieled insult and no more.

You, sir, are not a very nice person.

I love lamp!

@Dan Fleet:
...
Does that mean then I can take pictures of you nude, and sell them?
...

Did Jeff sell the communication that he put on this blog? Were you charged money by Jeff for viewing it? If not, then your argument seems pointless.

Regards
Fake

Haacked: "Sure, Twitter is technically public, but there are varying degrees of public as we learned from the first Facebook fiasco. I only have 300 or so followers in Twitter, which is where the conversation would've most likely stayed, but now it's on a blog with thousands and thousands of readers."

Bellware: "There is indeed a level of privacy, if not intimacy, that informs what a twitter poster might write. I know that my circle of followers is listening. There's an intimacy in that."

You two have essentially agreed with Jeff's point, whether you intended to or not. If one of the criteria of your conversation above was that it should be "intimate" or "a lesser degree of public", perhaps this should have been on a semi-private IRC channel or mailing list instead. Complaining that your twitter thread has been published publicly on a well-read blog indicates that you should have escalated to a more appropriate method of communication.

Fake51: Not to quibble, but technically since Jeff makes ad revenues on his blog now, he did profit in some small quasi-measurable way.

@Scott Bellware "Never ceases to amaze me how willing this community is to degrade exploratory dialog into name calling and to not have the courage to identify themselves."

Scott, you are a coward who refuses to directly confront explicit and direct criticism, always falling back on this little cowardly ploy of 'oh, you didn't give me your home address, so I'm not going to respond', or just falling into spewing expletives when people don't accept your view.

But, your continual inability to explain the simplest idea without falling into incomprehensible prose is such a delight. Please keep commenting/posting wherever and whenever you can.

Q: What does Scott Bellware tell the waiter when returning ill-prepared food at a restaurant?

A: "This gastronomical entity is insoluble, and insufficiently participates within the eating community."

@Scott Bellware writes: "...not have the courage to identify themselves."

You really sound on the verge of going postal when you spout things like that. As amusing as I think it might be to see you huff and puff in person, I really can't muster up the interest of going to the trouble of actually arranging a meeting with you.

On a serious note, what is it? Small man syndrome? Daddy never loved you? Still wetting the bed?

"Did Jeff sell the communication that he put on this blog? Were you charged money by Jeff for viewing it? If not, then your argument seems pointless."

Well, that wasn't really my point, although Jeff does sell ad space.

My question was against the metaphor. It also wasn't an argument.

Just because something happens in a public place, does that mean you have the right to publicize it? This isn't black and white. Where I live, you can't take pictures of people out in public and publish them without permission, even though they were in a "public place", doubly so if it presents the people involved in a negative way.

Now, I recognize that once something's out on the Internet, it can be very hard to kill, but I find it an interesting ethical, or at least etiquette, discussion nonetheless.

You should use IM for non-committed conversations only:
http://dotmad.blogspot.com/2007/07/use-im-for-non-committed-conversations.html

If you're getting physically angry over a conversation like that, the problem is with you, not the medium. Slap yourself in your stupid face and take a breath. Kick yourself in the balls and cry a little. Then go back to your conversation.

"Well, that wasn't really my point, although Jeff does sell ad space."

Ad space doesn't equal content: you have not bought the words on the blog.

"My question was against the metaphor. It also wasn't an argument.

Just because something happens in a public place, does that mean you have the right to publicize it? This isn't black and white. Where I live, you can't take pictures of people out in public and publish them without permission, even though they were in a "public place", doubly so if it presents the people involved in a negative way."

But I'm pretty sure you can write about them. There probably are a few places where you can't write about what happens in public but in most "western" countries you're completely free to do so. So while taking pictures is more of an issue (still, in most "western" countries, paparazzis are not outlawed) that isn't actually what's at stake here.
If you wanted to question the metaphor, you shouldn't be talking about pictures, you should be talking about my describing the people at the nude beach in intimate detail and then commenting on them. And if anything, we should question the nude beach metaphor to start with: how does having your twitter dialog reprinted somewhere else amount to being nude on a public nude beach? The only connection I can see is of someone suddenly finding himself nude on a nude beach and then realizing that he was there, nude, the whole time ("omg, people can read what I'm writing!!").

"Now, I recognize that once something's out on the Internet, it can be very hard to kill, but I find it an interesting ethical, or at least etiquette, discussion nonetheless."

I find the general discussion of public vs. private interesting. The internet part of it is just a sub-part and does not need to be discussed on it's own, as the internet brings no new ethical problems in the discussion of public vs. private. It just moves the exisiting boundaries a bit.

Regards
Fake

@Anon-E-Mouse:
As I wrote in comment to Dan, unless he actually makes YOU pay for it, it doesn't amount to selling the blog.
There is a big difference between taking something available in the public space, adding to it, posting it on your own blog, then adding some ads and on the other hand selling content that you copied from the public space. If not, I would expect (based on the semi-threats going round) at least one of the authors to get a lawsuit ready.

Regards
Fake

"But I'm pretty sure you can write about them"

Surely, but playing devil's advocate a bit: there's a grey area of fair-use where quoting someone is risky, depending on the context. Just because I post in a public forum doesn't mean I give up my inherent copyright to my content, unless I expressly agree to such by my posting.

However you certainly should be able to discuss what happened in a general "newsworthy" sense without any sort of moral outrage.

"The internet part of it is just a sub-part and does not need to be discussed on it's own"

Well I think the Internet so dramatically increases the boundaries and brings to the fore a lot of issues that are minimal or hidden in normal conversation. For starters, the Internet has a long memory.

What is more ethical: describing an online argument, with a pointer to the argument in its original context (e.g. the Twitter stream that contained it in this case), or quoting the argument as an effective, but ethically ambiguous, illustration?

I honestly don't know on which side my personal opinion would fall, which is why I find the discussion interesting, and why I think the Internet (or more correctly, digital communication in general) has an important part to play.

By quoting someone, you add to the spread of information. Should either or both parties wish to retract their comments, it is harder to do so if people start taking copies of their conversations and replicating them. The Internet enables the spread of such gossip to a truly large range. One can damage one's reputation on a global, not just local, scale.

Perhaps it behooves people to take the advice of Thumper's mom when talking in any online medium, or be prepared to have your words, pictures, or voice replicated in the strangest places. The genie's likely out of the bottle by that point, no mater the ethics or even legalities involved.

Makes me wonder if people would feel more or less comfortable quoting someone's conversation vs copying their music.

"Surely, but playing devil's advocate a bit: there's a grey area of fair-use where quoting someone is risky, depending on the context. Just because I post in a public forum doesn't mean I give up my inherent copyright to my content, unless I expressly agree to such by my posting."

I'm pretty sure I covered that bit with the response I posted to Anon-E-Mouse:
"There is a big difference between taking something available in the public space, adding to it, posting it on your own blog, then adding some ads and on the other hand selling content that you copied from the public space. If not, I would expect (based on the semi-threats going round) at least one of the authors to get a lawsuit ready."

We do very much agree on the following though:

"However you certainly should be able to discuss what happened in a general "newsworthy" sense without any sort of moral outrage."

You write:
"Well I think the Internet so dramatically increases the boundaries and brings to the fore a lot of issues that are minimal or hidden in normal conversation. For starters, the Internet has a long memory."

True, but so does publication in a lot of countries. In Denmark, everything that is published has to be deposited at the national library. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's in print it must be deposited. That memory extends FAR further back than the internet - which actually has a tendency to forget, something you should also consider (no, not everything is kept forever on the net. This is one of the fears of researchers: that we might lose a lot of the stuff published in our era because noone will keep a readable copy). So again, what may seem like something new and boundary-pushing has actually been around for a long time - but there's a new context so the issue re-surfaces.

"What is more ethical: describing an online argument, with a pointer to the argument in its original context (e.g. the Twitter stream that contained it in this case), or quoting the argument as an effective, but ethically ambiguous, illustration?"

Well, the lack of a link to the discussion is a negative, I'd say, but apart from that I wouldn't distinguish much between the two in this case. Note that Jeff has NOT literally copied the text - instead, there's a screenshot.
Apart from that, I'm not too sure there is much of a difference - links provide for spidering and so the information will probably be spread fast anyway.

"Perhaps it behooves people to take the advice of Thumper's mom when talking in any online medium, or be prepared to have your words, pictures, or voice replicated in the strangest places. The genie's likely out of the bottle by that point, no mater the ethics or even legalities involved."

What I find strange is that people actually think they can post something on the net and not have that be public. It's as if people think "I can tell my secret to 5 people and it will stay with those 5 people". No, you tell your secret to someone and it's no longer a secret. That's the reality - but it's always been the reality. Why people don't see that surprises me.

Regards
Fake