Do I follow you: Or: Do I know what you did this weekend?

So this exchange happened with New York Times business reporter Diana B. Henriques, a GW ALUM (who basically cracked every big Madoff story) and me:

dianabhenriques Diana B. Henriques

Have you noticed that Twitter has morphed from 'here's what I'm doing' (eating lunch, seeing a movie, etc.), to 'here's some information'?

nikkiusher nikkiusher

@

@dianabhenriques I think it depends. I just realized why need to consider whether my students might not want me to follow them...

49 minutes ago

Yeah, so, I realized that even though your tweets are going to be archived in the Library of Congress for your kids and grandkids to see how you spent your Saturday night, it's possible that I might not need to know...

At the same time, I'm stuck: I want an easy way to have an in-class Twitter feed. It's part of my job to make sure that you do know these tools, even though the class is not really a skills class and much more of a conceptual class. And I think it'd be a rad way to be able to ask questions #SMPASOCIAL

Everyone on the interwebs [click on that, it's a funny link] would think I was the coolest social media prof. ever.

Or maybe, the old just "raising your hand" thing just works fine. And maybe our etherpad is kicking butt. I don't know.

So tell me: Do you want me to know what you did this weekend? In this Mark Zuckerberg world where there is no privacy, actually there is privacy, but we don't need to keep anything private, should it matter?

For the record, I went to my wife's grandma's 80th birthday and saw Amish people. It was pretty rad.