Update (Jan. 15th, 2010): Thanks to Dr. Vartabedian (@Doctor_V) for featuring this campaign on his blog 33charts!

Here it is: I snapped a photo of the Privacy-In-Practice posters that University Health Network (UHN) has posted in its hospitals.

Looks like “Facebook, Twitter or blogs” are the big shots here. Do you think there are any other popular social media avenues that deserve to be listed as well?

For more information, see the post I wrote about seeing these posters for the first time last semester.

Facebook, Twitter, RSS, etc. may have changed the way I communicate, but in some arenas, the mere acknowledgement of social media still moves at a glacial pace. Naturally, I was surprised to see that the local hospitals’ notice boards had been outfitted with colourful new posters. Privacy tips, they were entitled.

The first one I came across went something like this:

Privacy Tip #14

Post wisely…

Cut detail when posting on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs.

Patients can be recognized without their names.

The social media triad grabbed my attention. After all, the other tips were well established truisms on shredding patient information at the end of day and not gossiping about cases in the cafeteria. This was addressing social media explicitly, which to me is an acknowledgement that the institutions are aware of the new technologies and feel some kind of need to rein in early adopters. An important step forward, I think, despite the not-exactly-rah-rah tone, because a time without rules is an exciting time, but it’s also a dangerous time.

I don’t need to tell you why privacy is one of the major minefields in medicine 2.0.

It’s clear that lines need to be drawn, though no one knows quite where. Many health care bloggers post with excellent objectives: to share their love of medicine, to discuss new technology, to give a public voice to physicians in the health care reform debate – in general, to give participatory power to the reader in the form of shared information. But who are the readers and what will they do with the information? Really, the only control the blogger has over the spread is to censor himself in the first place.

(more…)

DrV’s new post, a discussion on why teenagers don’t use Twitter (itself inspired by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern’s tech report), started me thinking on some conversations I’ve had this week with various teenagers aged 14 to 17.

Now these are pretty web-savvy teens – they have their own domain names, build websites for their schools, and had plenty to say when I picked their brains on Google Wave, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, iPhone, and a lot more. However, they were nowhere near as excited as I was about Twitter. Perceptions of the micro-blogging website (even this terminology was alien to them) generally fell along these lines:

• Twitter is for old people. They’ve heard about Twitter as a networking tool, but believe that networking is “something to worry about when I get a job”. Ditto for the “personal brand”, which has become one of my favourite ideas to talk about of late.
• Twitter is for following celebrities. A few were vaguely interested in following Obama (and Ashton Kutcher?)…otherwise…
• Nobody they know (or care about) is on Twitter. And thus it’s…
• Unnecessary. The old argument that Twitter is an entire social network dedicated to Facebook statuses. Why sign up for another site, especially when the attention span of the internet is so short? Even among fad-happy teenagers, there’s a certain amount of backlash against the concept of hype itself. They want to be given a little credit. And sometimes they would like to be convinced of a tool’s utility over its popularity.
• …And even unsafe? “I don’t want all my stuff on the internet like that.” Broadcasting beyond their immediate Facebook network has little appeal to teenagers. The risks of exposure and loss of privacy far outweigh any perceived benefits.

For example, one of the teens I talked to set up a website with a forum and contact list to help his friends from summer camp stay in touch during the school year. However, he balked when a few camp administrators got wind of the site and signed up. He later explained to me that since the point was to connect with a very specific group of friends, privacy and exclusivity was paramount. They had no news that they wanted to broadcast to the world, but they certainly had information that they wanted to keep from the world. Their purpose was therefore far better served by a private forum than by Twitter.

I’ve decided that it’s not that teenagers have no use for networking – they simply have no use for Twitter-esque professional networking until they reach a very specific activation energy. Perhaps by starting a business or heaven forbid…getting old

“Shut up about Twitter.”

Twitter is the service at the head of the microblogging movement. We’ve heard it all before. Twitter is over-hyped. It smacks too much of the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king.

And there are days when I concur.

There’s an awful lot of rubbish to wade through – especially if you’re new to the service and haven’t yet defined the way you want to use it. As Dr. Brian Vartabedian at BetterHealth wrote this week:

You likely won’t have any idea about how to use Twitter when you first jump in. And that’s okay. You can’t understand it’s power until you reach a sweet spot of followers and cultivate relationships that have some history and meaning (in Twitter terms, of course). Ultimately you do want to think about connecting with those who will put you where you want to be – whether it’s just raising your profile as an author or specifically drawing patients for lapband surgery, or whatever.

What you have to realize is…

There’s no “right” way to use Twitter.

Actually, I was kind of horrified by the opinion at ReadWriteWeb recently that Twitter’s founders are compromising the progress of the service by not using it in the same manner as its power-users, and I thought that CEO Evan Williams’ reply was spot-on:

As you know, there are lots of different ways to use Twitter. ….I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating (WHAT A GREAT WORD TO USE!) their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.

Seriously.

Follow who you want. Read what you want. Tweet your heart out (with netiquette, of course) and respect the right of others to do so as well.

I mean, I used to think that Twitter was about reading every single tweet in my stream. In that spirit, I set my Chirpr (a Vista sidebar widget) to make the “canary” sound with every new update, and let’s just say that my technology-hating roommate must have thought I was raising birds in my room! (BTW. I just downloaded Tweetdeck and am lovin’ it.)

Then I had to decide that I already have Facebook to keep random tabs on what my friends and acquaintances are up to, but Twitter, in contrast, could be a great link to people and organizations I’m interested in professionally.

The latter is now how Twitter is useful for me (which is of course key) and I’ve also figured out where it fits into my daily routine without annoying the heck out of me. You just have to try it and see. But most people I know in real life are still skeptical, so I thought I would provide a few examples from my Twitter experience so far.

Quick examples (not limited to Med 2.0):

• Apple WWDC. Fed up with RSS, I hadn’t touched by feeds labeled “tech” in weeks. I had no idea that Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developer’s Conference) began on June 8th. But a routine hashtag search for #googlewave alerted me to excited fanboys/girls of both, and subsequently to a live video stream of the event! Sweet!
• A live surgery! I found out from the ChristianaCare Twitter account that they’ll be live-webcasting and -tweeting a knee-replacement surgery on June 30th. Will certainly be tuning in.
• Gmail downtime. When my Gmail account went down, a search for #gfail was the fastest way to see if anyone else was experiencing the same problem without bothering my friends.
• Hart House events. Hart House is the University of Toronto’s student life center/athletics facility. It maintains a great feed of events, including a free pancake breakfast in celebration of Bike Month.
• BAHAHAHA! (As in, this is pithy entertainment!)
  “katy perry is the greatest waste of a great rack ever.”

So anyway, I’d love to hear about how other ordinary students use Twitter, especially if you’re in Toronto. Comment away.