LostFocus

Holy moly, once again I am blown away by the sheer stupidity and completely cluelessness of what seems to be quite a big part of the German-speaking twittosphere.¹ The Twitter people search was always able to map an email address to a twitter name – which is very useful if you’re new to the service and want to find your friends there. Many other Social Networking Sites have that same option. Facebook comes to mind, Flickr does it and as far as I know, Xing does it, too. Correct me if I am wrong.
Well, since a few days ago, it is now possible for Twitter users to switch it off. That’s not so bad – after all, maybe some people might not want to be found. So they should be thankful – yay, thanks Twitter, that we can now hide ourselves from being found while at the same time celebrating the fact that we have thousands and thousands of followers!
Of course, that’s not what happens – instead there is a rather uninformed and panicky blog post and even more uninformed panicky tweets and retweets and OMG! Twitter is fucking with our privacy! OMG!

Seriously, learn how the internet works or get out of it. Or at least accept that you’re new and dumb and that everything is both scary and awesomely cool at the same time and think about which tool you use. And don’t ever think that anything you type into your computer and put on the internet will ever be safe or locked to a specific user group. If you don’t want it online, don’t put it online.

1. I hate myself for using that word. I just couldn’t get myself to write kackn00bosphere. [↩]