As you may know, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, The Cassini Probe, Britney Spears, Shaq, 10 Downing St and, more tenuously, Darth Vader and the Fucking Pope are all on Twitter. But who is responsible for crookedtimber? Not me. The fact that the one person CT follows is a blocked account makes me suspicious.
By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK: no-one is making you follow anyone.
{ 12 comments }
Matt 12.12.08 at 6:14 pm
_By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK_
Well, _that’s_ a relief!
Jacob Christensen 12.12.08 at 7:08 pm
Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity. Strange activity? The list of “CT” followers is pretty interesting as well: I had no idea that crookedtimber.org readers were a bunch of gaming addicts…
Anyway, a quick search revealed a twittering Eszter and a KJ Healy which begs the questions: Is Eszter the Eszter or some kind of automated Eszterbot set up by a third party and how does KJ translate into Kieran?
riffle 12.12.08 at 7:30 pm
Funny, I presumed that Crooked Timber’s twitter was this:
http://twitter.com/kickbee
The Kickbee is a fetal kick detector that Twitters when it kicks!
Jacob Christensen 12.12.08 at 7:33 pm
Twittering before you’re even born? Welcome to the Internet 3.0. Or should that be Human 0.9.9?
G 12.12.08 at 8:18 pm
I’m guessing someone set up TwitterFeed for the Crooked Timber RSS feed.
Seth Finkelstein 12.13.08 at 3:38 am
“if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK: no-one is making you follow anyone”
Glad to hear it – there’s too much hucksterism implying that if you don’t join the follower-race, you’re condemned to be a social outcast from the K00l Kidz.
Eszter Hargittai 12.13.08 at 4:04 am
Jacob, my tweets are automatically reposted on my Web site so yes, those are my comments.:)
Neil 12.13.08 at 10:28 am
So it’s not okay to dislike Twitter while understanding it?
Kieran Healy 12.13.08 at 2:09 pm
So it’s not okay to dislike Twitter while understanding it?
That’s completely forbidden, yes. I have a list of other forbidden things here somewhere.
Justin 12.13.08 at 5:18 pm
The blocked account was some sort of spammer/pr person who briefly followed me. Seems weird referring to them as a spammer on twitter, but there’s no new name for what they’re doing.
josh 12.13.08 at 11:05 pm
“Seems weird referring to them as a spammer on twitter, but there’s no new name for what they’re doing.”
Then we should create one. I, with a striking lack of inventiveness, nominate “twamming” and “spittering”.
(I don’t actually understand how twitter works at all, despite being part of the age demographic that should supposedly be most up to speed about these things.)
Nick Valvo 12.16.08 at 1:57 am
Twitter spam is a strange beast, because the only thing that an unscrupulous person can do is follow *you*. At first I blocked spammers, but then I sort of stopped bothering, and the flow of unsolicited follows from probable spammers, hardly a torrent at its height, seems to have subsided. I think the engineers did a good job engineering a service that was fundamentally resistant to that kind of behavior. It’s like the opposite of email.
It seems like it would be possible to spam with @replies, and it wouldn’t be impossible to automate that, but happily I haven’t seen this behavior.
What should we/Justin do with the crookedtimber Twitter account, beyond the RSS?
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