Our minds on media.

Just a thought: if for any reason you wanted to follow only close friends or family on Twitter and wanted a way to more privately communicate with only that group of people, you could create a Twitter clubhouse. Set up an account that only allows invited individuals to see updates. When a person (who should be allowed in the group) requests membership, you (the presumed admin) would not only allow the individual to join but also give them the keys to the clubhouse (login and password for the private Twitter account). What this allows for is a few things:

1. Everyone that is allowed to follow the clubhouse can see its postings (including @ posts to the clubhouse).
2. Any member of the clubhouse can DM the clubhouse account privately and anyone in the clubhouse will see it.
3. Any member of the clubhouse can publicly @ the clubhouse

Obviously, this is not as fancy as a clubhouse could be. For instance, only one person would get the privilege of receiving DMs on a device. With most systems (like Tweetie for the iphone and ipod) that’s a fairly moot problem (since you can switch between accounts with relative ease and see DMs that way). But it would be a good way to create a somewhat cloistered area for casual semi-public messaging. I work on a collective novel over at Jelly Halo right now and despite the great things PBworks have set up, there isn’t a communication system that would be as “collected” in one place as this method would.