I’ve been experimenting with a secret Twitter account with the privacy setting enabled. The idea was that I could tweet about things I might not want to have associated with my professional reputation or software community persona.

In practice, I don’t feel more at liberty to make spur-of-the-moment, drunken, revealing, profane, arty, or otherwise inappropriate tweets to my private followers than to my public followers. It started as an attempt to be more spontaneous, edgy, and entertaining, but has led me back to the same interactions I was trying to shake off: at best boring, and more often awkward, self-conscious, and anxious.

Google+ explicitly attempts to solve the different-subject-matter-for-different-contacts problem, but somehow it falls short of that goal. There are a lot of problems with Google+, most of which have been discussed in more depth and at greater length on Google+ itself than I will discuss here. But I will say this: the format is rather boring. You post, a few people might +1 and someone might even attempt witty banter, which inevitably becomes awkward and peeters out.

We’re left with the same problem we’ve been having: we desire to communicate a message, and do so through the channels to which we’ve become accustomed, and expect to get some utility out of having done so. Perhaps there is the momentary gratification of having received a notification of engagement from a contact, and we strive to keep up the volley for as long as it suits us.

This ad-hoc usage social media is naïve and mundane. We should take a more measured approach to engaging these channels and work to communicate a coherent message with a specific goal in mind. For me, the secret Twitter represents a fragmentation of personal goals—my public and private accounts both represent me, but choosing to engage one or the other ends up being an arbitrary decision made in the moment, and neither representation is improved.

My public Twitter account has value because it provides a somewhat coherent message about specific topic—I have about 350 followers, which have come very organically through my engagement with the open source software community. I’ve met some awesome people and had amazing experiences as a direct result of engagement through Twitter.

I can see that there is value to be created through that channel, but on the other hand, both my public Twitter persona and the projects with which I’ve built it seem to have reached a certain maxima in terms of audience and mindshare, despite a large investments of time and energy on my part. There are myriad technical, organizational, historical, and social reasons why this might be the case, but it’s clear to me that I’m not optimally managing the time and energy I devote to my public persona and projects.

With this in mind, and with the help of my Comcast-imposed exile from the internet, I am actively re-evaluating my method of engagement by seeking out collaborations, affectations, and technologies through subterfuge, appropriation, obscenity, and other classical methods of research.