A few days ago, I posted the following tweet:

“Something has changed about my twittering and blogging recently. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

I think I figured out what’s going on.

I’ve always been a very open guy.  I don’t have a lot of secrets, and if asked, I’m generally really happy to talk to people about the good and bad things going on in my life.

However, Tumbling and Twittering has created a bit of a problem for me recently.  What I’ve realized is that I’ve found myself really hesitant to Tweet or blog about the things that are really on the forefront of my mind.  I’ve been finding these venues too public, and sadly, I feel like they are moving more and more in that direction.

Facebook went in this direction a long time ago. Too many friends, news feeds from too many people, and I just don’t have the motivation to adjust the privacy settings on all my contacts.

It’s sad really.  I know that a lot of folks in the venture and technology world blog and use Twitter as a place to broadcast to the masses.  It’s great… and I really benefit from being able to hear their thoughts and get a little bit of a slice of their life.

But that’s not me.  At this point in my career, I’m not really interested in pontificating too much, and I get a little sad when I find my Tweets getting more generic or self promotional.   It’s not that I don’t appreciate my readers and followers… I really do.  But I wonder if this venue is quickly becoming something very different from what I hoped it could be initially.

This was driven home recently because I had a pretty serious personal event in my life.  I didn’t know what to do… in a way, Twitter and Tumblr would have been such a wonderful way to give my friends the play-by-play, but it would have been really inappropriate as well.

Over a year ago, I blogged about how I wished there was a social networking service focused more on building depth in relationships rather than breadth.  Xanga used to be something like this… everyone had a handle, but you could create rings of friends who knew each others’ identities.  It was really very intimate, and I learned a lot about my friends, and they learned a lot about me.  I wonder if there could be something a little more modern that could take the best of that service and really find brand new tools and visualizations to reinvent social networking for depth.

But I’m kind of losing hope.  In a way, this kind of web service would have to have a limited network effect.  Where Facebook and Friendster got big fast because users wanted to quickly expand their network as quickly as possible, this kind of a service would grow pretty slowly, because once an individual had his/her 5-15 “inner circle” enrolled, they would be more or less done.

So, I’m kind of torn.  I see where blogging and Twittering are going, and I think it’s fantastic.  They are very much in the mainstream, and they are reinventing public discourse in a way that I’m really excited about.  But I’m also sad because I think I’m realizing that there is a private discourse that really matters to me, and I wish I could have a protected place that is optimized for me to share this with my close friends.  Maybe there isn’t a big business here, but I hope there is.  I think most folks would say that what really matters in their lives is their closest family and friends.  There’s got to be some way to enrich those relationships and build a meaningful company in the process.