Getting Found Out, Web 2.0 Style

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Or there's the story of one Web 2.0 mover and shaker, who asked to remain nameless. He is a notorious people pleaser, so when he's invited somewhere he doesn't want to go, he instinctively makes up an alibi, à la "I'd love to, but my mother-in-law is in town and we're having a tree-planting day in the park." You know the excuse: just sane enough it could be true, but wacky enough he couldn't be making it up. But, because he works in Silicon Valley's Web scene, where everyone is using every new social media tool, he now has to keep track of all these excuses and what days they were on, so he doesn't Twitter or blog about whatever he really did that day instead. And of course, he has to make sure no one he's hanging out with Twitters, blogs, or posts a Facebook photo. If he really wants to be convincing, he has to Twitter missives such as "Just planted a tree!" to keep the ruse alive. That's a lot of work for a little white lie.

Communicating with a Mass Audience

But besides being an annoyance, the snowballing prevalence of these busted moments actually underscores the disruptiveness of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the new social network aggregation tool FriendFeed.

These are distinctly different ways of communicating from everything we've seen to now, including e-mail, instant messaging, and even mobile messaging. Consider sending and receiving messages via Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry. It's still largely one-to-one communication, where you design a message with a specific person or group in mind. Ditto for IMs. But send a status update or a Tweet, and it's available to anyone you ever gave permission to see your information—and in some cases, anyone with a Web browser.

As this phenomenon spreads from early-adopter techies to mass audiences, it'll test some of the basic premises behind Web 2.0. Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen espouses the idea that people really want to hear from other people. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes people want tools that help them make sense of the world around them. Really? Maybe we've constructed social barriers in the offline world for a reason. Maybe we don't want to let everyone in.

Just as these new technologies get mainstream, there's likely to be a backlash. Remember the outcry when Facebook initiated the News Feed and Beacon tools, both aimed at disseminating information about what people are doing?

Making Sure Your Stories Jibe

The controversy reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George freaks out about his worlds colliding when his fiancée starts hanging out with his friends. In the Web 2.0 Age, worlds collide all the time, at hyperspeed. Done right, these tools help us keep in touch in an amazingly efficient way. I log into Facebook every morning and scan the list of birthdays and take five minutes to make Wall posts. Voilà. I'm a more considerate friend than I am offline. One 140-character Twitter note can tell my 3,000-plus followers I just wrote a new blog post. I called my parents last week; now that they're accustomed to "communicating" with me via Twitter, e-mail, and my blog, they were stunned to hear my voice. Yet because they knew the basics, we had a deeper, richer conversation. I even wrote my mother a blog post for Mother's Day, instead of sending a card. A former student found it and left a sweet saying my mom was one of the best teachers she'd had. Beats a sappy Hallmark card!

For me, the convenience trumps the fear of the bust. I've accepted it: My worlds have collided, and there's no going back. When I'm late on a column, I know better than to make up excuses that will only be contradicted by Twitter feeds. My parents and in-laws read my Twitter stream, so I don't write anything I wouldn't want them to see. Valleywag scours the Web for photos of me, so I make sure nothing I don't want to see on the gossip blog is posted. If I don't want to go to a party, I don't make up a lame excuse. I just say: "Sorry, I'm really tired and a night at home with TiVo sounds better." It's made me more honest, and probably given everyone in my life a truer idea of who I really am.

Of course, it hasn't come without my own embarrassing "Busted!" moments. Fortunately, a column is still one-to-many communication, and I don't have to tell you about them. You'll have to follow me on Twitter for that.

Sarah Lacy has been a business reporter for 10 years, most recently covering technology for BusinessWeek. Her book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, was published by Gotham Books in May, 2008. She is also Silicon Valley host of Yahoo Finance's Tech Ticker.