If you've been on Twitter for any length of time, you'll have seen dozens of plaintive requests like this. The same happens with missing people, lost dogs, and urgent political causes. Yes, it can be a little annoying to see the same thing again and again - but it's all for a good cause, right? Hmmm... I'm not so sure. The act of retweeting something important is often called "boosting the…
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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). …
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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