An audience of two

Tuesday July 08, 2008

Why You Should Care About Twitter Spam: A rebuttal
@kevinchu wrote an interesting piece on Twitter spam. This was sparked by a conversation in which I expressed the view that it's not worth the bother of blocking the spammers.

First off, let me confirm the obvious: Twitter is a very useful service, which has had rapid growth and consequently is having some scalability problems. There are alternatives, such as Plurk, FriendFeed, Identi.ca (do your own damn links) but none of them have the simplicity, power and mindshare that Twitter has. I am happy with Twitter and want it to succeed.

Kevin compares twitter spammers to arsonists, damaging the system. I think that's a little alarmist. I would compare them to the plastic rings that hold cans of soda. Remember how we were all encouraged to cut them up so they wouldn't harm wildlife?

Let's look at some numbers. Right now I have 172 followers (F). Let's say that my daily tweet count (C) is around 25. Now assuming that the load on the system is equal to F * C then my daily impact is 4300. If 25% of the people following me are spammers (by any definition that you care to provide) then blocking those spammers would reduce my impact on the system by 1000. (Of course this assumes that blocking actually helps; I don't know how Twitter is coded, so if blocking is implemented as an independent blacklist then we could in fact be increasing the impact.)

By contrast, Robert Scoble has over 28,800 followers. He also tweets a damn sight more than I do. Every one of his tweets has the same impact as a week's worth of my tweets. Is it reasonable to expect the likes of Scoble - or Leo Laporte (>46,400) or Kevin Rose (>48,700) - to go through their lists and weed out spammers? I think not. Yet if they don't, my pitiful effort is the equivalent of trying to solve the energy crisis by unplugging my TV every night.

So how do twitter spammers work? Well for a start they follow you in the hope that you'll follow them. My philosophy is that anyone can follow me, but I choose who I want to follow. If you're replying to me I'll see your replies in the reply tab (when it's working) or I'll get a message since I track my own ID (except that track hasn't worked for several weeks). Following me won't get me to follow you.

The other tactic is to post messages that get attention. Common tactics are to re-tweet breaking news, and apparently they are now harvesting the public timeline for posts to retweet. Will blocking stop that? Not really. The thing about the public timeline is that it's, well, public. Anyone can read it. Once I tweet, or post a picture on twitpic, it's out in the public domain. Good luck trying to get it back. So a spammer with half a clue would use a separate account that wasn't being blocked by anyone for monitoring the public timeline so as to get the most out of it.

As I said at the start, Twitter has scaling problems. They need to address those problems without impacting the real users. The broken features need to be fixed. Yes I want to help, but is my blocking fake users really going to help? Not until Twitter implements a system that measures how many people are blocking an account and takes action accordingly.

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Tags: networks social spam twitter

Thursday April 24, 2008

The problems with Twitter
I was reading Dave Levy's Twitter Manifesto, in which he comments one of the reasons I first dropped twitter was that I found consuming it on the phone too intrusive. This time I shall probably stop following those who post to much.

The problem with twitter is that it's like being at a cocktail party. There are conversations going on all around. Meanwhile there are several TVs all tuned to different news channels. It's information overload. It's crazy. And the filter is way too coarse.

What twitter needs is a way to group the people you follow. All that it natively supports is the ability to select whether updates get forwarded to your mobile phone or just to the web. So the noisier tweeters get relegated to web-only status.

An additional option is the "track" feature. By tracking myself I can see responses to my posts from people that I'm not following at all. But those posts only go to my mobile phone, not to the web.

Something else that Twitter desperately needs is the ability to reply via email to a direct message. Come on guys, it's not that hard to do. Rather than a no reply address it would be trivial to implement something like, say, a one-use-only reply address that expires after a fixed period.

Now the good thing about Twitter is that the API is open and published. There are all kinds of clients already available and presumably someone is working on things like this. But it would be nice if the facility could be built into the back end rather than an add-on.

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Tags: twitter

Thursday April 10, 2008

The power of Twitter
Unless you actually live in China you're probably all too aware of the controversy that's surrounded the Olympic torch relay in Europe. Well yesterday the torch came to San Francisco. It was inevitable that there were going to be protests from human rights groups opposed to China's actions in Tibet and Darfur (to name just two).

Conventional news reporting just doesn't cut it in a situation like this. You don't want to be listening to reporters on the TV or radio while they describe the long periods of nothing happening. You'd wait until the evening news and catch the edited highlights.

But that was then. These days everyone is a news reporter. First there was "live blogging", where people would post play-by-play account of some event from their laptop.

But now people have mobile smart phones that can send messages, take photos and even live video. At the core of this is twitter - a simple service that allows you to broadcast and receive short messages both via the web and SMS. It's mainly used for casual chatter, but yesterday it came into its own and proved it has real value.

Over the course of the afternoon I saw regular updates from @LaughingSquid (AKA Scott Beale) and @RockBandit (AKA Dave Schumaker). I discovered that reports from other twitter users were being aggregated by @SFTorch. And I learned that the protesters were organising themselves via @TeamTibet.

Twitter wasn't the only way to see what was going on. @RockBandit and others were uploading photos in real time to Flickr and video to Qik. Whenever I had a couple of minutes to spare I could check the latest updates and even talk back to the people that were there. I got a real laugh when I heard that someone had Rick-rolled the torch - something that would never have got a mention elsewhere.

Yesterday evening I watched the coverage on BBC World News. Rajesh Mirchandani was presenting in the traditional news manner, with the outside broadcast crew. Being constrained by the limitations of traditional media he was encamped by the ferry building and wasn't in a position to follow the story as it changed. He even made reference to receiving regular status updates on his mobile (without explicitly mentioning twitter).

So there you go. Twitter isn't just about chinposin' and colour wars. It's (sometimes) more than just inane chatter, You MUST click on this!!! and I'm streaming live right now, come chat!. It's actually a useful tool.

PS: If you want to read how Chinese media reported the event, click on this link: http://snipurl.com/utter-bullshit. (I love snipurl)

PPS: Want to see a ridiculously staged photo? Check this out. The torch was never anywhere near that point and the dozens of omnipresent blue clad Chinese security guards are nowhere to be seen. Damn, I wish I had Photoshop skills - it would be fun to combine that image with something like this.

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Tags: olympic protest tibet torch twitter

Sunday October 07, 2007

Neat new twitter feature
Apparently Twitter has added a new Tracking feature. Now you can track tweets that contain certain keywords even if you aren't following the person who is tweeting. I'm tracking cec2007 and suncec2007 to see how well it works.

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Tags: suncec2007 twitter

Tuesday October 02, 2007

Twitter@CEC
If you're going to CEC and your mobile phone provider doesn't charge you ripoff rates for text messaging, consider signing up for Twitter. This is a service that in effect merges blogging and instant messaging, optionally delivering updates (known as "tweets") to your mobile vis SMS messages. It's been called "microblogging".

Once you've signed up you look for people to follow. In each case you can decide whether to have their updates go to your aggregator on the net or to your phone. The benefit at an event like CEC is that you'll be able to send brief texts like "I just went to the Sun Update Connection breakout - you should check it out", or "Groan, this is sending me to sleep - see you at Starbucks afterwards"

It's yet another of those services that you'll either like or loathe, get addicted to or completely fail to see the point of, but when you're visiting Vegas with 3,500 other geeks it's certainly worth investigating beforehand. There's a suggestion on the CEC Facebook group that the organisers may use the service to send out updates and reminders. If you want to follow me, I'm http://twitter.com/davetong and I'll be Twittering throughout CEC.

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Tags: suncec2007 twitter

Saturday September 29, 2007

1.0 in a Web2.0 world
Frankly I haven't bothered much with the phenomenon that is Social Networking. I do have a LinkedIn account (as does practically everyone else at Sun thanks to the numerous RIFs we've had) and I'm on Friends Reunited, though I haven't been on there in ages.

While preparing for CEC I saw that there are already various CEC2007 related entities. Obviously there are the CEC technorati tags, which I'm still not sure I'm using correctly - my last post showed up twice, but not with the URL I expected.

The main one seems to be on Facebook. There are about 230 members; exactly the same number as there are in the Solaris group. Coincidence? I signed up for Facebook and went around adding friends and poking people. The integration with mobile devices seems interesting, although I'm not sure how useful it is yet.

There's also a CEC group on Ning, but there doesn't seem to be anyone there. Which seems to be a generic problem with ning as far as I can see - shame, because apparently it's a Solaris house.

There's even a CEC 2007 group on flickr, which is currently empty (not entirely surprising). What was surprising to me was that I had a flickr account already; I didn't realise that I did.

And that's the big problem with all this Web 2.0 stuff, and with the web generally these day. I've got accounts on services that I've forgotten about. Every time I go to them I have to remember my user id - was it davetong, davidtong, david.tong@sun.com etc., or did I pick something else. What's the password - every site seems to have different restrictions. You must have a capital letter, a number, a punctuation mark, a Greek or Hebrew letter, a control sequence and some chord that can only be typed using four fingers on the left hand. Where's the single sign on that was promised so long ago but never materialised? I mean, I'm not talking about sites that hold financial or personal information, I'm talking about things like message boards where I go to discuss wine or TiVo or football. My sign in on sites like those is hardly legally binding, it's little more than one of those HELLO MY NAME IS stickers.

What the web still needs is a simple credential mechanism that you can automatically verify, like an RFID tag, so that sites automatically recognise you. It's not about privacy and security, it's about ease of use. You could make it a USB Dongle or Java chipped memory card, so that it's something physical that can't be faked, but then the point is that the sites it "protects" are so mundane that there would be no reason or benefit to compromising it (beyond the simple hacker reason of "it's there"). Worst case, hackers could then log in to the wine forums as me and post "I LIKE WHITE ZINFANDEL" everywhere.

Sure Microsoft had its Passport (and may still do for all I know) but few of us trusted Microsoft with something as important as an email address. And there's something called the Liberty Alliance who I believe are working on something like this, but as I understand it their focus is on banking and e-commerce, not twitter and pownce.

Frankly I'm surprised that Google haven't already come up with something. Those guys are slipping. Maybe once they have their moon base they'll work on it.

In the meantime, you can poke me on facebook or follow me on twitter while we wait if you like.

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Tags: facebook identity ning suncec2007 twitter