I’m a pretty Web-2.0-savvy kind of person. I have a domain name, a blog, I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn… No one could say that I’m a Luddite.
However, I have to ask — what’s with this Twitter thing? So much press, ‘everyone’ is on it. A few weeks ago, the Guardian reported:
…it is huge step up to hold, as the Israeli consulate in New York did last week, a public, government-backed “citizens’ conference” on the social site Twitter – and then to keep replying to comments from all over the globe. It has proved massively popular: the consulate’s Twitter site (twitter.com/israelconsulate) yesterday afternoon had 3,739 followers, and at one point was posting a new comment, or answer to a comment, nearly every second.
On the Twitter website, it says, ‘With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing.’
- Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
- Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful.
- Partying? Your friends may want to join you.
Why? Why would you want to be hyper-connected?
I usually can’t think of anything non-banal to pass onto my friends via my Facebook status. So I don’t update.
According to Twitter, though, my friends, family and co-workers want to know the banal details of my life. Eh? Really? Really really?
It’s hard to explain until you try it. I’m @melstarrs – check it out. Totally addictive.
I think it lets you more deeply into someone’s life. I find just reading blog posts or whatever lets you into their life only if they have something important to say. By twittering, you see the more mundane aspects of their life.
Then again, if I want to do that I usually just chat to them. Which reminds me, I don’t have you on any of my chat networks! We should fix that!
Also, @joannac_ on twitter (don’t forget the underscore)
Hi Mel! It’s nice to see you here. I do enjoy your blog and your del.ico.us feed.
Joanna, although I’ve seen you once in real life in the past two months, that’s still more than I’ve seen you in virtual life.
I’ll have a look-see around Twitter and find out who else I know is hyper-connected.
I can no longer catch up with what’s going on at cyber space. I don’t have a face book and I have absolutely no idea what’s a Twitter! I feel like such a noob- do they even call a noob, noob anymore? *sigh*
I’ve seen a bit of spam recently – maybe turn on captchas (if available)?
Yeah, I need to figure out a way to stop the spam. I haven’t got captchas working yet (this weekend’s project, I hope). It’s strange — my WordPress settings are to moderate any comments with more than one link but this setting doesn’t seem to be picking the spam comments, which have a dozen or so links.
I’ve now figured out how to install the anti-spam Akismet plugin. We’ll see if it can catch the spam comments!
Joan, you have more spam.
I found it almost 100% effective in the past to rename wp-comments-post.php to something different in my installation. Funny, because the second Google result for wp-comments-post.php is “Renaming wp-comments-post.php does not help” 🙂
Something which would be really effective is if you rename wp-comments-post.php, and at the same time, rewrite your template so the comment post form is not static HTML, but is appended to the page at runtime with javascript. You’d have to be careful that the renamed wp-comments-post.php doesn’t appear unobfuscated anywhere in the page source. The downside is that users with javascript disabled can’t post comments.
Please don’t use captchas…