Jed Hallam asks how much you should giveaway?

Where does […] sharing stop and the competition start?

Professionally I have a broad rule of thumb that I don’t disclose anything that would impact the business and personally I don’t disclose anything that would embarrass my family or friends.

It’s an issue that I tackled over a pint with a mate recently. Our conclusion was that people generally share too much information – much as Jed suggests. In fact we came up with two business ideas.

• Competitive intelligence – by following a group of people in the same company its easy to pick up snippets of information. In the PR industry you can spot when there is a big pitch in play, in FMCG companies when a launch is brewing and in a tech firm when a new product release is due.

Business idea number one: create a company to track competitive information.

• Personal profiling – It can’t be long before psychologists start profiling people based their profiles and lifestream feeds as a means of pre-selecting candidates for dating or job interviews. Maybe it’s happening already. You could envisage how a Myers Briggs profile could be determined from a Twitter feed.

Business idea number two: create a company to create profiles of individuals based on their digital footprint.