DMFail: the place for digital rubber-neckers on Twitter
Every once in a while people mistype when sending a private message on Twitter’s popular status service, thereby publishing the supposedly-secret message for the world to see. Now you can watch these face-palm Twitter moments fly by in real time on the Web.
It’s easy enough to send a direct message on Twitter by typing “d” then someone’s username and the message. However, if you accidentally type in “dm” as a few people do every hour or so, then your message will show up for all to see.
DMFail has created a running stream of all these failed direct messages. Some of these misfires are more interesting than others and most of them are fairly droll.
There are a ton of people ‘testing’ out the new site’s functionality since it’s a new service. That means that a lot of the messages showing up are faked, if not even more entertaining.
Michael Arrington cites DMFail as yet another reason not to send any private information across Twitter. He also mentions previous privacy flaps involving applications failing to treat direct messages as private.
Twitter is predominantly a way to share your life with others freely on the Internet. Privacy isn’t a major part of the equation for most people on Twitter.
However, there comes a point when you want to speak more seriously with contacts from Twitter. How can you do so professionally when your message could be broadcast to hundreds of followers or the entire ‘Net through DMFail?
Arrington’s suggestion is to add “dm” as an alternative to the current direct messaging command, thereby making everything on DMFail private. While it would be a nice step, Twitter friends will have a harder time building deep trust in each other if they can’t trust Twitter to be more respectful of their privacy.
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July 29th, 2009
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