I've heard and read a lot of grumbling about how twitter/facebook status's pose security issues, and to be honest I'm not going to disagree; if I post an update stating "this big mac is cold
" it's an indication that I'm in a macdonalds and not at home, the fact that the twitter timeline shows "from mobile web" or "from iphone appX" only re-enforces the issue.
Some recent news coverage on digg has prompted some "that's not the same for me!" type responses; just because you don't have a house full of video equipment doesn't mean you don't have something worth stealing, maybe you don't live alone or you house isn't empty when you tweet, would you want your loved ones put at risk?
The most secure approach would be not to tweet... but where's the fun in that? ... another step is to not post location based tweets... "this laptop is running slow
" ... doesn't give anything away, I might be at home, I might not.... a lot of old-skool tweeters always recommend counting to 10 before hitting send (similar to the sleep on blog concept) to ensure that your current mood is appropriate for the web.
So now we come to why I'm posting, in the same way we obscure / hide information about what services we run on our computers / networks, is there a way to obscure the time at which we tweet? Well the tweet time will always be there - that's what twitter wants - but the content is up to us. I propose a last week hash tag - #lastweek- this tag suggests that the status isn't now, it happened at some point in the past.
Of course this approach is no more effective than leaving the light on when you leave the house, but it does add some uncertainty... if my living room light is on it could be because I'm sat in there, or it could be because I left the light on when I went to the restaurant... if I tweet "#lastweek meal at Joes rocked!
" it suggests I'm not at Joes and where I am now is debatable.
What's interesting is that as with all things on the internet, this idea isn't original; there are posts tagged like this already, I wonder if these status's really did happen last week? With this is mind I wonder what my next tweet will be? "#lastweek blogging
" maybe? :-P