Emily Gould conducted a similar experiment — except she didn’t see it that way until later. While she was working at Gawker, writing snarky posts about the private lives of celebrities, she was also blogging about her own personal life at a site called Heartbreak Soup, including her ill-fated relationship with fellow Gawker writer Joshua David Stein. He has written his own account of what happened in Page Six magazine, which you can see excerpted in large quantities at This Recording. As I was reading both pieces, it also reminded me of the very public life of Julia Allison, who blogged about her on-again, off-again relationship with troubled geek millionaire Jakob Lodwick of Vimeo and CollegeHumor.com.

Julia broke up very publicly with Jakob, and Emily did the same with Josh; and in both cases, their public sharing of intimate emotions and situations was undoubtedly a big part of the reason. So why did they do it? It almost seems to be a pathological approach to a relationship — or at the very least, a kind of stress-testing approach, as though by subjecting that person to the full glare of the public floodlights, they could ensure that their significant other was good enough to hang onto. And then if it didn’t work out, they would have something to blame. Both also clearly got addicted to the attention of their readers and “fans.” Gould quotes Allison as saying that “Attention is my drug.” And she describes her own relationship with her readers this way:

“They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.”

Emily’s experience seems to be just the latest example of what Gawker calls “oversharing,” and also of what can happen when the lines between blogger/writer and quasi-celebrity get blurred. We had a panel at the mesh 2008 conference this week called Private vs. Public, with U of T philosopher Mark Kingwell, sociologist Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas and Ken Anderson from the Ontario privacy commission (moderated by the always wonderful Rachel Sklar from Huffington Post, who has her own take on the Gould saga), but it didn’t really touch on the deep-seated desire that seems to exist in people like Emily and Julia to compulsively share every detail of their lives. Is this just the latest version of a new, Internet-enabled disorder?

Update:

There’s another piece in the NYT mag that makes for an interesting counterpoint to Emily Gould’s article: it’s a column by the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in which he describes research that shows human beings aren’t necessarily smarter than chimpanzees on an individual level, but they are smarter in groups — primarily because they are more social.

As I’ve said before on several occasions, I’m not really a video guy. I don’t think it adds that much to have video, unless (as Scoble notes in Fred’s comment section) you are showing someone something that relies on the visual element, like a new gadget or a new baby. But when I wrote my earlier post on the topic, I was mostly talking about video blogs — the ones that are exclusively video. Unless you’re Loren Feldman of 1938media (and let’s face it, who is?) that kind of thing reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when Kramer bought an old talk-show set and turned his living room into a fake talk show, but no one would go on.

That said, I’m actually thinking that video comments aren’t such a bad idea (some people continue to disagree). I don’t want everyone to use them, and I don’t want all the comments on a blog to be video — but in some cases it’s kind of fun to see Mike Arrington talking about Wired magazine, or to see Fred in person chatting into his web-cam. It is much more personal (which is why some people will probably never do it). But I actually don’t think it’s that bad. I think it adds a little variety — and if you don’t want to watch them, then you don’t have to. For an alternate (and hilarious) view, see this overview by Scrivs at Expert Idiot.

Thanks a lot to Mark and to Rob Manne and the other folks at Edelman.

It wasn’t that long ago that having a Facebook account was unusual for someone not in university. I can still remember telling people that I had one, and getting nothing but blank stares — and now most of those people have an account, or have at least heard of it. I’m also old enough to remember when a chat application called ICQ came along in 1997, and I quickly became a heavy user, along with some of my close friends. No one else had any idea what we were talking about then either. But by 2000, Microsoft had launched Messenger, and within a couple of years it had hundreds of millions of accounts.

Is the potential market for a “group chat” application like Twitter as broad as the market for instant messaging apps? Probably not — especially with a 140-character limit, which some people might enjoy as a kind of haiku-style restriction, but some would likely see as ridiculous (is there a shortage of electrons?). And it may not be as large as the market for Facebook either. But I don’t think the concept of Twitter is quite as foreign as many people make it out to be — and certainly no more foreign than the idea of “instant messaging” was not all that long ago. And as MG Siegler notes, there are some pretty cool apps being built on top of it.

Update:

Mike Arrington has some Twitter stats from a source inside the company.