“When someone (public) replies to my (private) Twitter stream, please don’t show it in the search, dearest darling Twitter.”
This has been nagging gently at me… isn’t that a hacky technical solution to a social problem — people should learn that messages sent by someone whose twitters are private should remain private. In the same way that people know that an email sent to an individual, or a private mailing list, shouldn’t be forwarded to everyone they know.
The difficulty with fixing this social problem is that, as far as I know, most Twitter clients don’t make it obvious whether a particular message is sent from someone whose stream is private or not. So it’s very easy to forget that out of all these identical looking messages, a few of them are only sent to a few friends, and not broadcast to the world.
So there is a technical solution which would encourage the social solution — have clients make it obvious which messages should remain private and thus not re-tweeted.
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