There is a lot of conversation about Twitter today. Chris Brogan and Clarence Smith Jr have posted an interesting discussion about it over at Do You KNOW Clarence? In this article they propose a concept they have dubbed “gates”, or, ways to control the sort of information you receive from your Twitter friends. Basically, you might follow someone who is often interesting, but then they might go on tangents about their cat. If you had a gate, or a keyword filter, then you could avoid the cats tripe, and only get the interesting stuff.
I wonder, however, about the reasoning behind this. Our on line “friends” are much like our real life friends; imperfect beings. In the real world there are aspects of my friends that are less than appealing. They might have terrible taste in music, or they might read really wretched books. They might even watch American Idol, and expect me to have discussions about something called Sanjaya, but they are still my friends. None of us are perfect, and we should try to consider this with out on line friends as well.
Of course, in the real world, I do not interact on a daily basis with 2000 people, which is possible on Twitter. But I still have a semantic problem with the concept of “Gates”. When I hear that term, I think of gated communities, fences keeping the riff-raff out. And the Internet is all about the riff-raff. You can’t block them out, or discard their ideas. They always find a way in.
