Comments on: Twittery

By: Nick Valvo

Nick Valvo — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:57:56 +0000

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?

By: josh

josh — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:05:09 +0000

“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.)

By: Justin

Justin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:18:18 +0000

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.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:09:03 +0000

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.

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:28:19 +0000

So it’s not okay to dislike Twitter while understanding it?

By: Eszter Hargittai

Eszter Hargittai — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 04:04:55 +0000

Jacob, my tweets are automatically reposted on my Web site so yes, those are my comments.:)

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 03:38:31 +0000

“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.

By: G

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:18:12 +0000

I’m guessing someone set up TwitterFeed for the Crooked Timber RSS feed.

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:33:37 +0000

Twittering before you’re even born? Welcome to the Internet 3.0. Or should that be Human 0.9.9?

By: riffle

riffle — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:30:44 +0000

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!

By: Jacob Christensen

Jacob Christensen — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:08:16 +0000

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?

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:14:39 +0000

By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK

Well, that’s a relief!