I've started seeing an uptick in Twitter spam - ostensibly from my friends telling me I can make money online. The common denominator is that they all use Pinterest as a vector for spreading the spam. Looking at the accounts of people who have recently tweeted these or similar messages, shows that the majority are real people - not automated spam-bots. So how is this happening? Checking the Tweet's metadata, the tweets all appear to come from the Pinterest service. This indicates two…
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Numbers matter to some people. It's sometimes not important who did something first - but rather who did things on "milestone" numbers. Here are the billionth messages posted on Twitter. 1,000,000,000 annchan@annchan2「ほのちゃんに歯が生えた」のほのかちゃんがもう１９歳て！あれから１９年！http://tinyurl.com/5lrcjv❤️ 424💬 5🔁 005:49 - Tue 11 November 2008 Although Ann is still on Twitter, the website they pointed to is long since gone. 2,000,000,000 Star1051@Star1051Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine - 11:11 PM vis…
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The UK has the notion of a "strict liability" law. If you are caught with a picture of child abuse - you're guilty of a crime. It doesn't matter if it was sent to you unsolicited, or misaddressed. Possession is the crime and there are no mitigating circumstances. On that cheery note, let's consider Twitter's new image embedding functionality. If your friends post a photo onto Twitter, you will see it in your timeline automatically. No need to click on anything. (As an aside, that's a…
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I am a feminist. I believe that men and women should be given equal opportunities and that - as far as possible - we should have a civic society composed of equal numbers of men and women. At least... I think that's how I feel. Most people believe that they are rational and live up to their own ideals. But can we ever really know our own subconscious biases? The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media have released a series of study about gender biases. One of the more interesting…
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I've found (and disclosed) what I think is an interesting little security flaw in Facebook's Two-Factor Authentication usage. First thing's first, this isn't a show-stopping bug. It's more of a curiosity which shows how different providers treat the verification of Two-Factor Authentication. Details If you are a security conscious user, you should have set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Every time you try to log in to Facebook, after providing the correct password, you are send a…
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As part of my quest to ensure I have a reasonable backup of all my social media data, I've been investigating ho easy it is to export photos from TwitPic. I've been using TwitPic since 2008 and have uploaded 1,200 images there. There's no official export function for TwitPic. The services which used to exist relied on their RSS feeds - which have since been killed off. This little Python script uses some undocumented APIs to grab all your images, save them in a directory, and make sure they …
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You can't. I mean, not officially. There's nothing in the API documentation, and all my attempts to contact Twitter on this matter have been ignored. If you're getting abuse on Twitter you have to use the official Twitter clients to report people. No matter that 3rd party clients may be better at protecting your privacy, offering you a sanitised view of the people tweeting you, or enable you to block offensive words or phrases. In Twitter's increasing war on the developers who helped build …
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OMG! Some star LOVES Samsung. Back when Twitter started, they used to advertise which Twitter clients people used. You could see that Stephen Fry preferred Feathers, and that I used Dabr. All was well. Then, of course, Twitter went to war with its third party developers. They cut their API limits, reduced their functionality, and obliterated all mention of third party clients. Which means that you can't see that certain "celebs" are hypocrites. Looking at the underlying data of the…
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After Twitter's repeated broken promises, I was unsure if I'd ever get access to my Twitter archive. But, finally, I'm able to extract my data from their systems. There are a number of deficiencies. Of course, it's impossible to please all the people all the time but, in typical Twitter fashion, they don't appear to have taken the effort to satisfied anyone. Let's take a quick run through of where the archive breaks down. Usernames Change When I first signed up to Twitter, I was known as…
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Twitter makes a lot of money out of me. At least, I assume so. The code I helped write, and the sites I run, are used by millions of Tiwtter's users. I've sent a tonne of traffic their way, and what has Twitter given me? Not even a "thank you." Seriously, no one from Twitter has ever said "Thanks for all the customers. Thanks for helping develop our presence in certain markets. Thanks writing tools that keep our users playing on our service. Thanks!" Compare and contrast to App.net. The …
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(I wrote this blog post in 2010. Given that I presented about this idea earlier this year, I thought it was time to publish it.) So, here's a good story. Having just finished my contract with Touchnote, I was looking for work. A friend of mine tweeted... Cathy Ma@cathymaknow any good mobile product manager? We're looking for a contractor role :) let me know and pls rt ;)❤️ 1💬 0🔁 011:55 - Tue 29 June 2010 ...I applied for the role at IPC and, after a couple of interviews, got the job! A w…
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It's the height of self-indulgent wankery to blog about why one is flouncing away from a social network. So, here's my rant. There are many like it - but this one is mine. Let me start by saying something which I hope is obvious. Twitter belongs to Twitter. It's their game and they can take their ball home any time they like. Therefore, all whinging and whining by jilted developers ought to hold no more weight than kids moaning that it's all so unfair! Still, my blog, my rules. Let the…
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