It's amazing how much the Internet has changed, really. Well, I probably mean the web, don't I? Anyway, things feel rather different from when I started my first blog (or "online diary", as I called it then) around 10 years ago. It wouldn't have been nearly so easy for people who know me in real life to track me down, back then - but now, if you want to cover your tracks, and keep your real identity under wraps, you have to be careful. I had to create a Google account to use Blogspot, and Google are pushing people into connecting their YouTube accounts to their Google accounts. Well, what if I don't want everyone knowing that I sometimes listen to Keane, or Feargal Sharkey, or that I enjoy watching rabbit show-jumping?
In the same way, Microsoft are now affiliated with Wordpress in some way, so your Hotmail account could point to a blog you've hosted there without you really expressly permitting it. The Windows Live Messenger 2011 version, which Microsoft are pushing through with a Windows Update, insists on you using your full name, and wants you to connect to Facebook and Twitter. Hotmail has quietly introduced a social networking element, meaning that your contacts can see who your other contacts are. I'd like to keep my e-mail address book to myself, thank you, and I don't really want people being able to see a list of what I have been up to using my Hotmail account!
It all makes me thankful that "Web 2.0" wasn't around when I was younger - school age - because I can see that a lot of misunderstandings and teenage drama could be made far worse by the inability to keep things private, and of course, it would then probably be around in some form or other for ever.
I was extremely annoyed today that I had been added to one of the new-style Facebook groups by someone, without my consent, and that it had been published on people's "news feeds". One of my friends text-messaged me to warn me, because it was on rather a sensitive topic: emetophobia. I had expressly told the girl, whom I know through an emetophobia support site, that I was not "out" to my family or most of my friends, and yet she decided to make it public by adding me to a public group without my permission. I deleted myself from the group and deleted her from my friends list, but I don't think she's noticed, as she's fairly self-centred. I'm still verging on slightly furious when I think about it. I am not sure my actions would have removed the emetophobia group notification from people's news feeds.
Another consequence of the development of the web is that it took me absolutely ages to choose a username that wasn't taken. I'm not sure that I'm totally over the moon about the one I have got, but it will do.
"I didn't know you were a writer?"
"Well, that's because I write under a Sudafed!"
