I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.

Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?

In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.

It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.

I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.

Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.

Facebook has such bad usability all-around that nowadays I tend to only navigate to Bejeweled Blitz and follow status updates throug TweetDeck. When do I then go to Facebook? When I get an email from the service, telling me that someone has commented my stuff or sent me a message. Rumor has it that Facebook is in fact working on developing a full webmail service, where you could receive messages to your vanityurl@facebook.com.

Google is the current king of email with Gmail. Nothing comes close, except the threat of people’s increasing usage of media other than traditional email for their messaging needs. Google isn’t standing still, instead they are trying to incorporate more and more social features into Gmail, like the recent announcement of Google Buzz. And where does the Buzz exist in terms of UI? In Gmail. Where do the comments to your status updates come to? Your inbox. ¡Viva la email revolución!

Google Wave is trying to go beyond email, but the current preview version (notice: not even beta!) has one severe limitation: it doesn’t act like webmail, meaning you can’t actually send emails to your @wave.com address. Yeah, what do you call and @address that’s not an email address? It’s hard to see the adoption rate picking up until Wave embraces email.

Numerous Enterprise 2.0 application providers are keeping themselves busy by building wonderful collaboration environments for office workers, to make them more productive in their daily tasks and teamwork. But still they can’t come anywhere near email. Everyone uses it and it is the lowest common denominator that every information worker loves to hate, but couldn’t live without. As Jacob Uckelson writes about the enterprise collaboration paradox:

So even though almost every enterprise has special purpose solutions available for collaboration and process management, good old e-mail always ends up being the primary method for both collaboration and processes in the enterprise. This can be called the “enterprise collaboration and process paradox,” and is the “dirty little secret” of both collaboration and process execution in the enterprise. Realistically, there doesn’t seem to be any way to displace e-mail as the king of collaboration and processes

Everybody used to be stressed about the growing amount of spam email a few years back. Today the rate of spam that avoids my junk email filters is probably 0,001%. Email used to be confined into desktop applications like Eudora or the omnipresent Outlook. Now it’s in the browser and in your mobile phone, meaning in practice everywhere.

Email has come a long way and it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s more likely that we’ll just be getting more of it.

Here’s a demonstration of the core difference. Slashdot.org is down (at the time of writing), so do I go to Facebook and yell this out to my friends? Hell no, I haven’t got enough nerdy buddies that would care about it. But what about on Twitter?

Nowadays the best way to determine whether a popular online service is down just for you or the entire web population is to do a search on Twitter. There is always going to be some people wondering the exact same question as you, to the extent that they will go through the effort of tweeting about it. That’s the real-time pulse that Google is still missing.

If only Twitter’s front page would be designed in a search oriented way, driving people towards entering search terms instead of new tweets (who needs more of them, anyway?), the perception of the service could be altered in a quite profound way. Until then, the average user will upon initial viewing just see it as Facebook without Farmville and Mafia Wars. For some people, that will of course be reason enough already.