What Is Private Twitter?

I bet you sleep with your phone and as you roll over each morning your hand slides under your pillow and as your eyes barely open youre already pulling down to refresh your Twitter. That needs to stop now. You are CONFUSED about what is going on here.

A bunch of assholes tweeting the highlights of their Best Life and Funnest Night Out is not an accurate representation of what is going on inside their own shitty apartments. Their breakups, their alcohol dependencies, their whatevers, their totally human experience of suffering. The AwlThere is, however, a secret place where some of the smartest, most genuine voices are expressing their inner feelings, insecurities, victories, and defeats.

Some of these voices include talented engineers, designers, and even executives at well known companies. Theres a new service or product to share thoughts with your friends every week, but there hasnt been a social network which embraces emotion. Not through emoticons, stickers, or different ways to express feeling through a piece of glass, but a place to be vulnerable and open to others.

The economics of social networks tends to involve user and user graph growth, which is in direct opposition to the ideal network size that youd want to express your feelings and thoughts as openly as you do to a group of close friends. Take, for example, Path, which was supposed to be a more genuine version of Facebook for your close friends and family. Pressures to show user growth drove it down the same path as every other social network, watering down its premise and eventually leading it to the problem of not being differentiated enough from Facebook itself.

Without a sensible product to turn to, people came up with all sorts of ways to accomplish this using existing social networks. None of them work particularly well. Private group chats are often too intrusive to read through the day (due to being push notification based and being a shared feed of content between all members of the group) and private sharing on existing networks, such as Facebook, is notoriously hard to configure (with a large up-front commitment to categorize people into lists) and finally, there is absolutely no guidance on what these hacks are supposed to be.

There is, however, one particular configuration of Twitter accounts which I think works particularly well as a much more genuine social network. It is a feed based and the timelines reverse chronological nature lends itself naturally for self expression without imposing on the reader the obligation to immediately read or respond to the thoughts expressed. It consists of a group of private Twitter accounts between close friends and coworkers which has a lot more genuine self expression than public accounts.

This network of private accounts has a few interesting properties. The follow graphs of each individual account is a mix of public and private accounts and unique from other accounts in the network (so the follow relationships are assymetric), yet the graph overlap is significant. Most of the network is composed of private accounts which follow each other.

The main purpose of a network of private accounts is to open up a forum for discussion away from the public profile. This allows for freer discussion of controversial topics and a way to express oneself without the fear of misunderstanding or embarrassment from those without context and the repercussions of having ones public thoughts archived forever. Everything from conflicts with coworkers and friends, job hunting, good (or bad) dates, surprising events, and raw feelings are expressed with much more clarity and depth of thought than on the public network.

Theres also a minimal filter for communication, because theres implicit trust that the authors place in their followers to not leak or otherwise use these tweets in a malicious way.There are also certain genres which can chacterize some of these private accounts. A typical private account is very similar to a public Twitter account but with a lower threshold for what is considered appropriate to express.

Its very similar to how a conversation can differ dramatically in polite company versus with a group of close friends.Another type of private account is a feels account. A feels account is characterized by the avoidance of opining on current events or replying to tweets to instead focus on one question: how do I feel right now?

A third is an anonymous public account. The author takes care to make sure the account isnt traceable to any particular person but the intention is similar to a feels account: cathartic self expression, opinions, or weird Twitter.I think theres a real product in here somewhere, a place to combine the space for genuine thought without the inconvenience of leveraging a product which is built to drive user and follow graph growth.

In a follow up piece, Ill post a few examples of the posts from private Twitter and how they compare to posts from public Twitter on the same topics. Its often a more nuanced take, which is lost in public due to the roles we conform to in our public lives RELATED QUESTION Which custom lighting design manufacturers would you choose to work with (as in, your preferred list of custom lighting design manufacturers for new projects, renovations, and/or construction of a new home and/or commercial property) and why? Residential and commercial lighting are different products.

You do not give a reason for wanting custom vs. off the shelf products. A unique custom lighting product is backlit onyx and hinoki wood walls, desks, columns, and stairs by GPI Design of Cleveland.

The onyx and hinoki veneer are sandwiched between glass. Boyd Lighting is a San Francisco Bay Area maker of high end lighting. Phoenix Day is another Bay Area custom manufacturer.

Holly Hunt is a collection of custom lighting manufacturers. Working with a lighting designer will save you time and money while guaranteeing your project will meet codes, function, and look good.