At last, the quest to wrest control of my name from all those dead senators, financial analysts, and random college students begins! Today, a game of ego-Concentration, tomorrow the top of Google.

Anyway, if you could all poke at the page for a minute and let me know if you see any bugs (besides the ugly, I-obviously-drew-them-in-five-minutes graphics, which I’ll fix sometime soon), I’d appreciate it — especially if you’re running any version of IE/Win. JQuery is supposed to be nice and cross-platform, but it was so easy to work with that my paranoia makes me think it must be broken somehow.

There are movements underway to unify site logins and even the network of networks, and something similar might be useful for statuses. MoodSwing and MoodBlast will post a single status line to a number of different services, which would seem to solve the problem of too many dangling statuses.

The problem with the all-in-one solution is that I don’t necessarily want to post the same status to all my different profiles. I might choose to present myself differently in my status line depending on the kind of people I interact with on various networks: relatively professional for work-related IMs, full of non-sequiturs on Facebook, tracing the flow of my day on Twitter. All of these services serve slightly different purposes, and simply mirroring the same status across all of them might make me look hobgoblinishly consistent. Also, I’m sure that anyone with enough free time to track me across all the sites I frequent would get awfully bored.

Instead of having one status mirrored across many sites, it would be better to have all of my different statuses aggregated into a single point, where I can see at a glance what I’m doing. Something like this:

Presence of Mind mockup. (Click to see the actual page.)

Statuses are sorted from most to least recently updated, and sized and color coded to suggest that the statuses I update more recently or frequently are the ones that are more important to me. If this was a real app instead of a mockup, you’d be able to update your status inline and watch the table resort itself in some clever DHTML way. Of course, while we’re living in my fantasy world, all the listed services would have open APIs that would allow you to read and write things like statuses without resorting to screen scraping.

At any rate, I think that something like this would be a nice way to maintain a sense of your own presence around the Web and give yourself a chance to meditate on your own public personae. If I get really ambitious, I might see if I can fill in at least some of those lines with real data, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you; I’m sure something else will catch the fancy of my online OCD tomorrow.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use Twitter to publish thoughts that are too small to warrant a proper blog post. I use it to follow the thoughts and experiences of various friends, acquaintances, and interesting people. I use it to hear about things as they happen (e.g., the VA Tech shootings, the Digg/HD-DVD flap), even when I’m away from the computer or TV or radio. I use Twitter to reestablish and reaffirm my sense of connectedness with all the random people that make up the Internet; it’s a form of online communion.

The problem with Twitter is that it’s almost too random; it’s difficult to find anyone specific without poking through your friends’ lists of friends and hoping for the best. The randomness and tenuous networks of Twitter may be part of its appeal, but it’s not so great when you actually want to do something specific, and can’t.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

One of the unusual things about Twitter is that unlike blogs or other public social profiles, you have a pretty good idea of who your audience is, or at least who your regulars are. Mine are mostly real-life friends, some folks that I met at Minnebar, and some random (but very nice) strangers.

The only people that I truly wish were in my audience are the ones with spare iminlikewithyou invites for me.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read Tweets through Twitteriffic when I’m at home, and by text message when I’m out. Because both of these formats are push, I do see all of the tweets that come at me; I’ve had to leave (silence) a few bot-driven Twitterers in order to keep my traffic under control. I don’t know all of the people whose Tweets I read, but I do know what some of them are having for dinner and watching on TV. For some reason, postings about everyday minutiae don’t seem as frivolous on Twitter they do on blogs, LiveJournal, Facebook, etc.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

What’s appropriate for Twitter is the same as what’s appropriate for the rest of the Web, which is the same as what’s appropriate for any public forum: if you don’t want your mother or your boss to hear about it, don’t post it.

I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at knowing where my boundaries are, so I usually don’t need to second-guess my Tweets. The only times I’ve decided against posting are when I feel like I’m getting a little too stream-of-conscious or spammy. I can convince myself that people are interested in the minutiae of my life, but I can’t believe that they want to swim in a veritable sea of my posts.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

Again, I try not to post anything I don’t feel comfortable making public, so public it is. If I don’t want people to know about something, I keep it to myself.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

When I first saw Twitter, I thought it was just .plan files for the Web 2.0 generation. And it is. But no one on a VAX ever thought to finger everyone on the network, all at once, and feed the collected .plans of everyone I know to my cell phone (or if they did, they probably crashed the server and got yelled at by the sysadmins). I’m sure that a year from now, we’ll all have abandoned Twitter for the next novel form of online interaction, but for now, it’s proving to be an awfully nice way to keep in touch.