I guess I should tell you what I’m talking about in case you don’t want to read what the infinitely more knowledgeable and tech savvy Paris Lemon/MG Siegler wrote about. (The problem with blogging is that it can leave you feeling redundant. Immediately after getting Twitter my full length post production took a nosedive. Suddenly I found myself wondering why I wasn’t just posting “Good X album is good.”) For those of you who are either easily satisfied or like to be economical with your open tabs, I’ll tell give you a little info on 140inabottle. The service allows anyone, even non Twitter account holders, to compose and send a tweet which will, according to Siegler’s post, bob along the interwebs for anywhere from one to ninety days before it washes up in someone’s Twitter feed. It’s a completely random and anonymous interaction since the message will be delivered by the 140inabottle account instead of the author’s. Siegler goes on to consider how people can easily game the system and target specific users by merely mentioning them in the text so that a message will effectively arrive at two users’ feet. He’s right of course, but that doesn’t really interest me. What does interest me is the question I posed at the beginning of this entry. What do you say to a complete stranger when you can tell them ANYTHING at all as long as it’s within 140 characters? 140inabottle is a pretty descriptive name but I feel like “Crippling Freedom” might be an even better fit. Do I want to advise, uplift, confide… The fact that I have no idea who it’s going to makes me wonder how general I should be. Maybe I should just send a lolcat. An unexpected lolcat would improve anyone’s day no matter what. You just won the lottery? Here’s a lolcat. Your idiot son crashed your car? Have a lolcat. See, it can’t not work.

I was curious what other people were doing with this and of the forty-three messages delivered so far I’d say the majority are predictably emo and self righteous with a little weird humor in there as well. There are really very few complimentary and uplifting messages in that stream so far. Frankly I find a lot of the behavior and logic surrounding 140inabottle to be impenetrable. For starters, the account has followers. Real human followers, I checked. How is that not pointless when the account only send @ replies?

Then there’s the confessional tweet genre. It just seems like there are better forums for it like grouphug.us or post secret where you could really get it out there and where the feeling of unburdening yourself would be better realized because there is a community who is interested instead of on individual who’s going to get sandbagged by the fact that you think you killed your twin sister when they check their Twitter over their morning coffee.

Then there’s the ultra impersonal “I’m affecting change. The revolution’s on it’s way brah”
I mean, I guess. Doesn’t that just kind of feel like something you’d brush off your shoulder without taking a second look at though?

The compliments and uplifting messages are certainly nice to see but, like I said, are in the minority and are pretty general.

And then there was this. I’m not even really sure how to categorize it. My gut tells me to file it under creepy but then I read it and think, “but it specifically says it’s not creepy.”
I just don’t know what to think of it except that these anonymous services always sound really cool to me until I try them and realize that we have nothing to say to each other. That’s a startling realization for someone who spends hours a day writing messages to people. In the end I don’t really believe that we have nothing to say to each other. I can’t. If the sheer volume of content posted on the web every minute isn’t enough proof, I have really satisfying (for me anyways) interactions with strangers and acquaintances every day both online and in person. We must ask ourselves, “what is it then that is lacking in systems like this?”

If anyone can remember that anonymous and random (in the true sense of the word) IM site that that high school student thought up and had go viral on him for a minute a while back, please put it in a comment. That was another one I thought was going to be really interesting and ended up being a dud.

**I don’t know why this didn’t get posted earlier. In four days it will be exactly one month old. In that month 140inabottle has made over 1,100 tweets. I am still not impressed with us anonymous twitterers.**