I was listening to Marketplace News on my local public radio on the way home tonight, and I heard an interview with Nick Bilton about his new book, Hatching Twitter:  A True Store of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal.

It was an interesting interview and it made me want to read the book.  Apparently, the creation and building of Twitter had been nothing less than chaotic (I mean, check out the subtitle).

The interviewer asked Bilton if he got full cooperation from the principal characters while writing the book, and Bilton made a comment that really got my attention.  He said that he went back and reviewed the four Twitter founders’ Facebook status updates, their Tweets, their posts to Flickr and to YouTube, and in many instances these didn’t match their memories.  He used their social media posts to help verify, clarify and, I would assume, prompt recall of events.

Ok, so I may late coming to this realization, but we are daily contributing to our biographies via social media.   With pictures.  And videos.  And often snarky one-liners.

Ignore that I am stupid and late to this game.  But I don’t think that my contributions to social media have been good enough to use in my biography (to any future biography writers out there).  I have always been cognizant of the “rules” of social media, the rules according to me.

• Rule 1.  Assume that everything that you post could end up being seen by anyone in the world
• Rule 2.  Assume that you can’t make everyone happy, but you shouldn’t try to piss everyone off
• Rule 3.  Follow the advice of your mother–don’t talk politics or religion in someone else’s house
• Rule 4.  Your mother has already seen you nude as a child, and she doesn’t want to see you that way as an adult (refer back to Rule 1)
• Rule 5.  If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.  (I don’t always follow this rule.)

When you follow these rules, your social media contributions are pretty bland.  And I’m pretty private, as well.

I think that I’m going to have to SPICE UP MY TWEETING!  Bam.  It’s on.  Cause I want it to be a good story.

(Should also have a good story….but that’s beside the point on social media, right?  It’s just about telling a good story, right?)