Twitter

I received a few emails about my twit-out post and I figured while I don't won't post the address of the posters I would answer them publicly.  If you want to comment on my blog, please use comments and not email.  Thanks!

Subject: This is why!

Sean-

Twitter is down right now.  This is why we need to have a boycott.  Get it now?

<name redacted>

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Subject: It's not hard why don't you get it

We're protesting to get twitter fix their *%^!. 

<name redacted>

Some posts this evening about a twitter boycott scheduled for 5/21 to protest the outages at twitter.  Where I'm all for protests that have some meaning, I really don't understand this one.  As far as I'm concerned a protest makes sense when a company's customers feel that the company is willfully mistreating them.  A perfect example of this is the livejournal protest from last month.  LJ users felt that adding adverting without notifying them was unfair and protested.  Whether the protest was successful or not, is another question, not for this post.

The Story so far
By extreme stupidity I managed to flood twitter using drupal's twitter module installed on http://seanreiser.com My problem was that the twitter module tweets every new node, not ever new front page story as I thought.

So I've been noticing recently an increase in the number of spam accounts adding me on twitter. I won't link the accounts here, mostly out of a desire not to give them any google juice. These accounts are generally, obviously spam (all posts are related to stocks, "that certain part of the male body", selling die cast cars, etc, etc) and link to some product or service. Some twitter spam-y accounts I do subscribe to (The twitupdates account springs to mind), because I find value in them, it's providing a service I like so it's more bacon like then spam.

First off, I'd like to make things perfectly clear, I use both my blog and twitter as a place to test technologies. There's always a possibility that something I do will cause a minor explosion. It happens rarely, but every now and then it's going to and I apologize in advance for this. This is a bit of a playground for me.

As is painfully obvious to my twitter-peeps last night there was a bit of a mishap involving twitter and my blog. In a period of a minute I basically retweeted my last hundred tweets or so. I'm posting what happened here so folks having similar issues can see what went on and how I'm handing it in the future and possibly some changes I'm making to the drupal modules in question.

So... on to my story. A few days ago I posted an entry about making my blog the center of my web presence basically adding friendfeed style features into my blog and using seanreiser.com as hub to access my online content.. While doing some research I found a drupal module named activity stream which grabs content from a number of services, creates drupal nodes for them and creates a stream for your site. It also accepts RSS and has a plugin system that allows you to create interfaces for services that it currently doesn't support. So, last night, being the curious person I am, I decide to install the module on seanreiser.com's drupal install and check it out.

Last night, Warren Whitlock tweeted

Is FriendFeed going to replace Twitter? Follow me on http://friendfeed.com/warrenwhitlock

That might be a good way to get your current followers to subscribe to your FriendFeed but it got me to thinking about if FF could replace twitter as the prominent messaging social network. My initial reaction, which Warren retweeted was:

@WarrenWhitlock twitter is to friendfeed as baseball is to espn

On the heels of Rachel Clarke's Twitter Frustrations, and a dinner with a friend last night I've gotten to think who I follow. I know I've blogged on some of this before but the way we use these tools changes as time goes on so I thought an update was in order.

OK, about a year ago I joined twitter, where I'm not sure of the exact date I joined, I'm working backwards from my post Twitter: A week with a new toy.  I figured it's time for a follow up post on how I've used twitter and what I've learned in the last year.

Found via ellybabes

It's not the outages, nor the stability issues but when Snop Dogg shows up it might be time to go.

http://blog.twitter.com/2008/02/shizzolate-your-twitters.html

Update: As I know someone linked to this ... this is sarcasm; the benefit to twitter is I don't need to follow SDD if I don't want to.