I joined twitter 802 days ago on 17th May 2008. Since then I have sent 2,623 tweets, an average of just over three a day. Not too bad for anyone who thinks I spend too long on the site.
In June, according to twitter COO Dick Costolo the micro-blogging site had 190 million users, growing by 300 thousand a day. These users were generating 65million tweets a day – that’s enough for twitter to be building its own brand new datacentre to handle all the traffic.
I’m told that some people at Glastonbury found it easier to watch the event streaming video to their mobile phones even though they were at the gig itself.
If you were stood at the back apparently the picture on your mobile phone was bigger than the live view of the stage. I remember once going to a Bruce Springsteen gig in Roundhay Park in Leeds (some time ago now I should add). If I held up my little finger horizontally at arms length Bruce was about half the height of the fingernail.
I’d be surprised if there was much bandwidth available to stream to a mobile at Glastonbury though I suppose with the (more…)
Interesting to flit round the various online poll results for some of the newspapers, taken 15 minutes after the end of the debate:
Guardian Telegraph Times
Gordon Brown 28.5% 16% 15%
Nick Clegg 62.1% 38% 59.9%
David Cameron 9.4% 47% 25.1%
I think I will wait for an independent poll - the above are somewhat partisan.
Interesting to watch technology in action though. I followed the debate on line with SkyNews and with Twitter.
#debill actually made it to a trending topic on twitter today. This reflects the huge amount of interest around the country on the subject of the Digital Economy Bill.
I watched it both on iPlayer and via Tweetdeck where I could see real time comments on what was being debated. MPs inside the chamber were also following twitter – you could see them referring to their mobile phones whilst others were speaking.
I’ve actually changed my view on twitter since getting involved in #debill. It is a hugely powerful medium and one that can spread messages globally very quickly. For example one of my blog posts was retweeted by Jeff Pulver who has somewhere in the region of 355 thousand followers. If you have a message to get across and push the right buttons twitter is huge.
Interestingly because #debill was a trending topic on twitter, ie one of the top topics being followed by people it also attracted its fair share of spam – people jumping on the bandwagon – notably today by people trying to flog iPad.
We are all still finding our way in this connected world.
PS there can’t have been more than 20 MPs in the house debating such an important subject – democracy in action. It is getting harder and harder to decide which way to vote.
I’m doing a bit of tidying up on twitter. In the early days of twitter I thought it would be a good idea to follow as many people as possible. What a mistake that was! I now get so much rubbish that it makes twitter unusable as a browsing machine.
So now I’m sat on tweetdeck “unfollowing” people with whom I feel I have nothing in common. It’s amazing who I find I am following. I’ve just deleted someone called Ryan Seacrest who has 2,411,465 followers despite only following 124 people himself. I obviously live sheltered life because I have never heard of him! 2,411,464 people clearly have!
When I started to use twitter a little more earnestly I took a look at some other twitterers and determined that there was a pattern in getting lots of followers. These Tweeters (if that is the right word) were also following lots of people.
So I did the same. I randomly started to follow people and found that half of them then began to follow me. Of course the downside to this is I get a lot of traffic in my “in tray” with comments from people who I really have no interest in. So much so that it is hardly worth looking at the feed.
I now periodically unfollow people who, after looking their profile, I feel I have nothing in common with. I’m trying to narrow it down to a useful set of “follows”. My criteria are I keep a friend if they are in the UK and look “normal”, in my business space or do seem to have something interesting to say. There are a lot of people out there spouting rubbish and a lot of “services” that are no use to me – local news alerts in other parts of the world for example.
Spending a little time ”unfollowing” in the early hours this morning I am astounded to come across some accounts that have huge followers. One, @DigitalRoyalty, had more than a million! Drilling into her profile I found that she was an online PR specialist. Clearly good at her job.
This is a new world. I feel a little like Captain James Cook setting out on his first voyage of exploration.
I have to apologise to Dave Ward who manages the firewall at Timico HQ in Newark. I complained to him that he was blocking me from accessing Twitter and he scurried off to check having denied it all. (it’s not a criminal offence in my book anyway).
I just read that Twitter was this afternoon hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack which took out the service for a few hours from around 2pm. Sorry Dave. Whenever I publish a blog post Wordpress automatically sends a tweet on the subject which in turn updates my Facebook status. What would we do without Twitter eh?
I’m off on rugby tour to South Africa tomorrow so no blog posts until Thursday 2nd April at the very earliest. Not only would I not trust myself with a laptop on tour but I won’t actually have much time to write as we have a very busy schedule.
That isn’t to say though that the blog will be inactive. On in the sidebar to the right of this post you will see a stream of tweets that will keep people posted re my progress. Provided there is mobile phone coverage, and I can’t always be sure of that out in the wild, I will keep the updates coming including how I get on in the two matches we are playing.
You might also, if you are going to be watching the Lions v South Africa second test at Loftus Veersfeld on Saturday, keep your eyes open for me in the crowd. Thanks to all those who have wished me well on this trip and I look forward to telling you all about it in person at some stage this summer.
I’ll post some pics on Facebook when I get back.
I went in to BBC Radio Lincolnshire this morning, as is my occasional wont, this time to talk about email scams. I am not particularly a security expert but I guess being in the ISP game I would get more exposure to this than your average Radio Lincolnshire listener.
It was all about phishing emails from people after your bank account details, and especially spoof emails notionally from people you know. As a bit of background research I googled “how to hack MSN” and I was astounded to find 952,000 websites on the subject.
Similarly there was plenty on Twitter and no doubt there will be stuff out there on Facebook and others. I didn’t follow more than a couple of links and the first article had already been removed. It does certainly highlight the vulnerabilities of the web.
I get phishing email daily, mostly caught in my spam quarantine folder, and all of which get ignored/deleted. I do get some very genuine looking spam though appearing to come from reputable contacts. In one example a business partner of Timico’s had its contact databased copied a number of years ago. I still get spam appearing to come from this partner. There is nothing they can do about it. The data is gone.
I have never personally met someone who has been caught out by one of these phishing attempts. Not that is until last night when a friend rang me up and during the conversation mentioned that it had only just happened to him. He was busy and stupidly responded to an email and typed in his bank account details!
Luckily for him the bank spotted an unusual transaction and refunded the cash after calling him to check. It just goes to show how easily it can happen – to the unwary.
)If anyone wants to add to this list feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment.