Twitter

Bye bye birdie

Tim Farley has the scoop on the Mabus arrest. He was a notorious spammer who even spammed me on Twitter (I guess that means I’m a true skeptic now).

He would spend hours at it. For example, on February 25th I found 25 separate accounts he used. Based on the timestamps of the posts, he started around 7:30am, and posted more or less continuously until about 10am. He continued somewhat more slowly until noon, when I presume he took a break for lunch. He resumed at 3pm, and posted until 9pm that night. I counted almost 700 tweets. And because of the way Twitter was deleting each account (and all its output) when they noticed the spamming, all of that output from that day was gone within minutes. Disappeared.

It’s really a great story. Read the whole thing.

Why I tweet

Because now I finally have somewhere to put all those crumpled up notes to myself, quotes, citations and brilliant thoughts that would otherwise get thrown out or catalogued in one notebook after another and never see the light of day. Twitter is perfect for this, and it lets you share them with your followers. Plus, it’s a nice way to gather interesting links for further use. I think of Twitter as an ongoing log, a bit like blogs used to be back when they were web filters. In fact, the blog that gave blogging its name, called Robot Wisdom (“a weblog by Jorn Barger”), really looks more like a Twitter feed than a blog. Too bad it fell victim to its author’s anti-Semitic rantings…

Now I can cancel all those annoying emails I get that I never open from the Anti-Defamation League. I can just follow their Twitter feed and read the things that look interesting. Ditto everyone else. Email can go back to being personal.

(This post has been truncated by my daughter waking up.)

Obama Bear Hug

If you haven’t seen this week’s Economist yet, it has an excellent cover. Just one of the many reasons we still enjoy opening the mail in the Age of Twitter:

In less than 10 years time, say the cyber engineers, the Web will connect every aspect of our digital lives to every other aspect of our nondigital lives – e.g., when typing an e-mail the Web will already know what the subject is and will suggest Web sites and books, as well as documents, photos and videos that are pertinent, and anything you have saved in the past that is still relevant today. It will be known as the Web’s “inherent intelligence.”