Latest Updates: search RSS

  • How To Lose Followers And Alienate Tweeple

    admin 11:40 on Sunday, 11. January 2009 | Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: flashmob, follower, following, movement, movie, movietwitter, participant, renaming, search, title, tweet, tweets,

    It all started on a typical Friday evening with nothing to watch on TV. I turned to Twitter and noticed some strange posts with renamed movie titles tagged #movietwitter.

    Since I’m a huge movie fan I opened a search panel for this tag and found that already some hundred people joined into this “event”.

    movietwitter - Tweet Racer

     After a short while this tag showed up at the top of the trending topics on Twitter Search and continued to grow and it continued to rise to the top of Twitter Search and Twitscoop.

    movietwitter - The Day The Tweets Stood Still

    Since every participator was typing large volumes of bogus movie titles, some, more reasonable people got annoyed and started filtering, blocking and to unfollow people.

    movietwitter - Password Failwhale

    Personally, filtering is the best option for such an occasion, since Twitter is all about following people with topics and interests similar to yours. But to unfollow people just because they have a good time with something you don’t want to accept is kind of childish.

    movietwitter - Last Man Following

    The results of the way was that I lost about 4-5 followers and gained 3 new ones. One of the people unfollowing me joined up again on the next day and I still liked what we did on Friday.

     
  • Privacy? What Privacy?

    Mirco 17:55 on Sunday, 11. November 2007 | Comments Permalink | Reply
    Tags: find, information, people, , profile, search, surveillance, user

    In case you haven’t noticed… there isn’t any anymore.

    Everyone in the industrialized world is under constant surveillance. Every telephone call we make can be recorded, every email we write and all the websites we visit are stored for later processing.

    With the growth of the social network hype more and more information on people is given away willingly. You only have to connect all the information from these networks and other traces on the net to build a very detailed profile of someone. You and me included.

    Time for a little experiment.

    Google has about 430 findings on my name. These include two others carrying the same name, which is astounding to me. But since I’m not unique by name it will be harder to profile me, or will it?

    Multiple listings of Stayfriends and franchises that keeps me in touch with my schoolmates. My Amazon wishlists… so if you want to get me something nice for Christmas go on. A lot of newsgroup aggregators, since I’m using the good old NTP regularly to solve problems. My ClaimID profile. Some Proxy caches of my Mashable account!? …and another one. A surname collector. What people think of to get their Adsense accounts into good use. My Flixster account is listed on page 9, Last.fm on page 11, Xing is even listed on the last page with a profile of someone who lists me as a contact.

    And the conclusion? Anyone knows where I live, where I went to school, what kind of music I prefer, what I think about hundreds of movies, where I work, and most importantly who I know. Although it’s not everything about me, it is a lot of information for someone who is not part of the government machine… and I almost bet I could find as much information about you in 5 minutes.

    “Good night, and good luck”

     
c
compose new post
j
next post/next comment
k
previous post/previous comment
r
reply
e
edit
o
show/hide comments
t
go to top
esc
cancel