How “evolved” are you when it comes to personal privacy on Twitter?

Do you send out personal updates that fall under the “too much information” (TMI) category? Maybe that’s part of what Biz Stone was referring to at a recent speech in Salt Lake City when he shared his observation that “users are still evolving their “digital selves,” particularly on issues of personal privacy.”

If you tweet with any regularity, we have some points you should be aware of – and possibly rethink.
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One of the biggest complaints I get when I’m teaching people how to use Twitter is that they have trouble following everything that’s going on. There is so much information coming at them, it’s overwhelming and they can’t keep it all straight. Even for seasoned pros, the more peeps you’re following, the longer and more cluttered your feeds can be. How do you streamline everything?
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Are you sending automated updates from Foursquare to your Twitter feed 20 times a day? Please stop. Believe me: nobody cares that you’re at Starbucks for the fourth time, or that you’ve just ousted somebody we don’t know as the mayor of Joe’s Pizza.

Nobody on Twitter, that is – your Foursquare network might be very interested. So why not leave it there?

The same goes for LinkedIn, Facebook and Quora, or anything else that lures you in with that convenient, but always undesirable, ‘send updates to Twitter’ checkbox.

Twitter works brilliantly as an aggregator for input – that is, being able to quickly and easily follow updates and content from newspapers, blogs, politicians, media moguls, celebrities, colleagues, friends and family – but if you’re aggregating your output, then it’s just a lot of unnecessary noise. And if you’re consciously adding to that, then yes, you are part of Twitter’s signal problem.

It’s also incredibly lazy. Repeat after me: automated bad, manual good.

I follow you on Twitter because I want to see what you have to say on Twitter. If I want to see what you’re saying on Facebook or Quora, then I’ll follow you there. As long as you’re saying different things. Seriously: if you’re mass-updating and churning out the same old stuff everywhere, or polluting the stream with a load of automated junk, then why would you expect anyone to follow you at all?

Lots of people get a real kick out of checking in at places and reporting their current location. I’m have to say that I’m not one of them. However, if this is your kind of thing, you’ll soon be able to do this easily on Twitter with a new featured called Twitter Places.

We’re excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match–you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.

Other features include:

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration
• API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications
• Support for more browsers (including IE)

You’ve been able to do something similar to this on various mobile apps for a while now, but Twitter has made it all official and built-in. Enjoy.

(Source: Twitter blog.)