Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Thu, 18 Jun 2009

Can Twitter Count?

I recently signed up for Twitter, already was on Identi.ca, and both are micro-blogging sites/tools. Twitter is the more popular one, but I suspect it has issues that need to be resolved before I can give it my full support. Twitter has a public timeline page, too, like the main identi.ca page. If you check the links, you can see they are pretty much alike.

• After I signed up for Twitter, I did a search for two people who recommended I try it. I couldn't find them by last name. I couldn't find them by user name.
• Today I got a follower notice by email from Twitter. I went to check the profile. The follower had only one post from two days ago, but already had 189 followers and was herself following 1253 other people. Because URL links are compressed automatically to save space, one cannot quickly judge the real address. It isn't wise to visit a site blindly unless you trust the person who has done the post. As I didn't know Lucy Khong [lucyhong], I decided against following the link on her lonely post. Then I noticed her avatar image. It had significant cleavage, and though that's not necessarily a bad thing, it made me even more certain that this was Twitter-SPAM. I made the decision to block Lucy from following me.
• When I went to my own Twitter profile, it said I had two followers, one of them is the guy who convinced me to sign up. There was no number two.

I reiterate the title: Can Twitter Count?

And even more serious, can we count on Twitter?

Another factor for me is that Identi.ca is run on open source software from Laconi.ca. I am a fan and advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

posted at: 17:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry