Twitter Identity Issues – Is Tweetdeck oversharing?

There seems to be a lot of talk from twitter commentators about twitter’s new facility to view another user’s timeline

For example, from techrunch:

Twitter has just rolled out a nifty little feature. Now on anyone’s profile, when click on the “Following” link, you’ll be able to see exactly how they see Twitter. In other words, you can see the same timeline of tweets that they see when they’re looking at their main feed.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/26/now-you-can-see-twitter-the-way-i-see-twitter/

However, I have not seen nearly as much coverage of another “innovation” by Tweetdeck, recently acquired by twitter, that allows you to quickly assume the timeline conversation of another user.

In the changelog for the Tweetdeck for iPhone v2.0.2 (issued a week ago or so) it says:

Added “User Timeline List” feature.  Accessed from the menu button on any Twitter profile page, this will create a private Twitter list based on all the people (up to 500) that the user follows, allowing you to “be” that person…sort of 🙂

Wow! That’s quite a bit different.

You can now easily, at the touch of a button, mass follow the list of people that that user has built-up over time.

Of course there is no copyright on that list, and you always could see who was on the list, but following people meant a laborious process of following each one individually.

The work of refining your “follow” list to remove noise and keep the conversation relevant and interesting requires investing a lot of time and effort, and now you can shortcut this.

Not sure I feel this is a step in the right direction. What do you think? Are you bothered?

iPhone TweetDeck updated to v2.0.2 : TweetDeck Support
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1 Comment
  • Robert McIntosh
    May 27, 2011

    Interesting points made in a private conversation. It is not actually wrong, but strips one more layer of privacy. Who does this help, really?