Yesterday, PJ wrote an article about Porn MD's transfixing real-time display of other people's porn searches. In that article, PJ posited that part of the appeal was that it was a peak into a universe that we don't usually see, because "while we share most things online, porn consumption is one of the few online media consumption experiences that usually remains private. Very rarely will someone 'Like' a porn website on Facebook, or tweet a link to some great porn they enjoyed." One of our readers informed us that may not be the case.
"I don't think this necessarily holds true for all places and all times," wrote reader Even Westvang. "A couple of weeks ago I put together a wee experimental image viewer for the realtime Twitter streaming API. The amount of smut and nsfl [I assume he means 'Not Safe For Life'] imagery right off the public feed was surprising. I would hazard around 5%. So this seems to be part of the vernacular for some."
Granted, there are plenty of anonymous pornographic twitter feeds, but I think that we may underestimate how exhibitionist people can be on the web. Check out Even's "Mercer Device" to see a dizzying real-time stream of public images from twitter, if you can handle an occasional image that's not safe for life.