Diary of a Disordered Mind

Because there is no difference.

... you twitter during the birth of your child - just ask @sara wife of Evan Williams, CEO of twitter.

Dear Twitter, My water broke. It wasn't like Charlotte in Sex and the City. Now, timing contractions on an iPhone app.

about 14 hours ago from txt

The Contraction Tracker was fun until the contractions got painful.

about 12 hours ago from txt

Admitted to hospital. Got the second-to-last room.

about 10 hours ago from txt

Epidural, yes please.

about 8 hours ago from txt

The heartbeat monitor soothes the silence of a room that will shortly be anything but silent.

25 minutes ago from txt
 
I'm not sure my wife will be doing the same when we have children and I'm certain I'd get a pasting if I went anywhere near my phone...

Yesterdays denial of service attack which took down twitter and effected facebook, google and, it has emerged, the blogging site LiveJournal, appears to have been a large scale attack by Russian hackers to silence one man: a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu.

 The attack, it is alleged, was co-ordinated by Russian hackers who sent out spam messages containing links to Cyxymu's twitter, facebook, LiveJournal and youtube pages. Cyxymu's pages at these sites are still down, though this may not necessarily be due to an ongoing attack rather than people curious to see who Cyxymu is. The question now is, how are these sites going to defend themselves from similar attacks?

 And does this mean I might have to do some work instead of reading twitter?

The twitter Fail Whale was seen at around 2:00pm UTC today. The twitter status blog warned the site was down, before updating to announce they were "defending an ongoing denial of service attack, confirmed on the main twitter blog by Biz Stone.

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack.

Yet more bad news for the service which, it was announced today, may have to defend a lawsuit originating from "mass notification" firm TechRadium alleging infringement of three patents.

Recently, I've been getting spam followers on twitter. Only, I'm not exactly sure what the owners of said spam accounts are trying to achieve.
 
When you get spam e-mail, you are effectively forced into reading at least the subject of any message that slips through your spam filter like an electronic SAS operative sneaking past a heavily armed guard. It lands in your inbox, you read something about making your cock bigger or getting a share of $1m for doing nothing or that you've won a lottery you didn't enter prompting you (and, by you I mean a net savvy person) to delete it immediately and go about your day.
 
With twitter, if someone wants you to read about their money-sharing scheme/lottery/cock pill, you would have to follow them first. That's the beauty of twitter - you only have to put up with people that you find interesting. So why set up a dodgy account?
 
I suppose one aim could be to gather information about people but, provided you don't broadcast sensitive material over twitter, there is no gain to be had as most people are aware that whatever they say is fair game to everyone-and-his-dog as twitter feeds are public. The only other aim I could see was, most people get e-mail updates when they get a new follower. In the e-mail is a link to the followers twitter feed. You could advertise something dodgy from here. I've seen a few spam profiles that have one post about being "hot" followed by a link to, I'm assuming, a porn site. The crafty spammers use url-shortening services to disguise what it is you're about to follow. Surely though there are easier ways to get people to follow links and it seems to me that they're going to a lot of effort for relatively little gain.
 
Just so you know, most of the spam users had IDs that followed a set pattern:
 
@girls_nameCapital_letteryear
 
eg @bettyX1980 (sorry to @bettyX1980 if you are not a spammer!)

I've been using twitter for a while now and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I know the concept is very simple but, because of the openness of the API, there are many cool things you can do with twitter other than simply telling the internet what you're up to.
 
I've been increasingly following hashtags and using the twitter search to read tweets on selected topics from people I would necessarily want to follow particularly during events like the recent England v Ukraine World Cup Qualifier. I like the way you can get a fans perspective on the game rather than having to listen to (in my opinion) awful analysis from ITV.
 
The problem I found was that the twitter website rather basic and currently lacking in a number of features I would like. For example, the search page is not linked to from the main twitter site (unless your searching for a person), and you can't see trends or specific peoples @replies. Leo Laporte reported on TWiT recently that on some new accounts at least some of these features are being added, but unfortunately, not on mine!
 
So, I've been looking for a desktop interface for my iMac. I tried to use TweetDeck but I didn't really get along with it. I think mainly because it's a bit ugly when compared to native Mac software, and I found it a bit clunky. I was, therefore, really glad to see that Tweetie, an iPhone app, had been ported for the Mac. As it's Mac native the GUI is as you would expect (see pic above) and it's very simple to use. you can read your own twitter feed, someone you're followings tweets and @replies (meaning it's much easier to follow conversations) and there's a global search filter, making it far easier to follow a subject, which also has a list of trends.
 
Tweetie is free (provided you don't mind them inserting short adds in your feed) or $15 for the full version (before 4th May).

I've been using twitter for a short while now and somehow have managed to persuade 50 people that my random comments are worth reading (or at least are not so offensive that they have remove them from their twitter stream). It seams strange that anyone would take the time to read anything that I've written.

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, 50 followers is nothing. @stephenfry has close to 360 000 followers and @Dave_Gorman, a brilliant comedian and documentary maker, has close to 23 000. Stephen Fry has made a point of, wherever possible, following everyone that follows him. Obviously it's a little difficult given his number of followers but he has at least tried! Dave Gorman has made a point of only following those he is interested in. This has, surprisingly, caused a number of problems for him recently. In a blog post Mr. Gorman describes an incident where a "fan" lashed out in extremely peculiar ways after DG decided not to follow him. It seems that some people think they have a right to have their comments heard. Why? Surely everyone on twitter has an equal right to follow whoever they want. Just because they're famous and you're a fan of them doesn't mean they HAVE to listen to you. Besides, surely you want them to follow you because they enjoy reading what you have to say rather than because you asked them to.

I suppose what it comes down to is this: are you proud of the followers you have because they're fans, of a sort, of what you have to say or are your followers merely a collection to show off to your mates?

In a twitter post I mentioned that I was a LOVEFiLM subscriber. Suddenly I had a new follower: @LOVEFiLM_UK. They have also, on occasion, sent @replies to me when I have mentioned them even if it was in a comment directed at a specific twitter user. The experience got me thinking; because of the pretty open API twitter has, it's fairly easy to trawl the whole stream of tweets and pick out users that mention your company name, your name, a product/website/pet of yours and, I'll be honest, I'm a little concerned.
 
I can totally understand companies and individuals wanting to protect their brand or their own image, but it seems far too easy for people to target you directly based on what you say. I also understand that twitter is very public and is probably not the best forum to start slagging off your bank, for example but I still feel like it's a bit stalker-ish.
 
The other potential risk is that spammers could use twitter to direct spam to users based on keywords that crop up in tweets. I only hope that the creators have a contingency plan for when the spammers hit which they inevitably will with the exponential growth in numbers they're experiencing.

   

Yesterday, I (@i_are_scientist) sent a seemingly innocuous reply to a tweet sent to @qikipedia. Basically I was correcting the previous tweet stating toenails were cells. Within seconds of @qikipedia tweeting the above thank-you, ten people started to follow me. Having checked my google analytics account this morning for my blog, I found that my traffic had more than doubled for Sunday 8th March compared to, well, every day previous to it!
 
I have finally worked out what twitter is for: shameless self promotion.