Friday, December 31, 2010

"Twitter Segmentation": or why you need at least three accounts

After I'd been using Twitter for a few months (ok, I really don't remember how long it had been) I realized that I needed two accounts for a number of reasons: privacy, personal branding, and audience. Well, when I created @seclectech I'm up to three accounts. Here is why. Besides that I take my time on Twitter way too seriously.

As much as I love shooting the shit with folks as @frednecksec that is just one side of me. And arguably not my best side. I know it. It is the the snarky, sarcastic, cynical side that can't help but mock the endless FUD about SCADA and Smart Grid Security and the never ending drumbeat of Sinophobia and generally react by picking positions I may or may not believe, just for the fun of it, and just to mess with people.

But I don't want to engage in that all the time and it is not healthy either. Sometimes, I don't want to follow people that engage in that sort of nonsense (or cause me to engage in that sort of discourse) I just want to learn about cool technical stuff (whether security or non-security related). Folks like @jonoberheide @jordansissel @jedisct1 @rgaidot consistently provide solid technical information about the topics I'm interested in (and might be interested in) without the snark (i.e. security and technology politics) of other folks I follow on @frednecksec who might be more entertaining.

If twitter had better filtering options (for example that would allow me to block hashtags such as #stuxnet or #wikileaks or #tsa) I might not need to do that, but until that happens I need two different public accounts depending on the tweets I want to produce or consume.

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