43 posts tagged “twitter”

I was trying out a program that showed where one’s Twitter followers are on a map. I had no idea Brisbane was so far away from New Zealand.

   I will have to tell my friends on the US west coast how Brisbane is only a few hours’ flight away, at most.

Wow, I guess no one uses the Twitter application on Facebook any more. I know I had signed up, but given that it stopped working today, then this does not surprise me. Facebook must be peeved off if it reports that the plug-in has a grand total of zero users:

I started Tweeting in 2007, and earlier this year, decided that Lucire needed a Twitter account.

Imagine my surprise when Fashion Quarterly (we call them ‘that fashion magazine from the Packer Press’ and they call us ‘that one we don’t really worry about’) followed me today and I visited their page to have a peek:

First Twitter died for nearly two days. Facebook has been progressively dying, first removing its navigation bars, then its logo, then making false accusations, and now removing all the contents of my home page. And today, I see Vox has begun recommending splogs on my blog:

   I have reported many of these and tonight, I am just too tired to. Hopefully someone else can take up the baton for the time being. Vox is pretty good at dealing to these.

If you plan on asking Twitter for support, you can’t. The helpful section that was there has now gone, and you are stuck, as with Facebook, with known issues.
   The only resolution I had was to go to this forum link on Twitter. In the lower right-hand corner of the page, you should see a box where you can ask a question. Fill it in, and you should be taken to another website called Get Satisfaction, which is monitored by Twitter. You will need to sign in using Open ID or Windows Live.
   I am not sure what good this will do, but if you need to vent and hope there’s some remote chance someone from Twitter will hear you, it’s the best thing.
   It has been impossible to Tweet here all day, and Twitter has made no announcement on whether its site is down—it certainly isn’t a ‘known issue’.
   Hopefully the above will help some Tweeters out there who cannot post, add or block on the site.

First up, yes, I am annoyed that the Dailymotion embedded video in the last post starts by itself.
   Secondly, it seems Twitter is pretty dead again. I can receive other people’s Tweets, but I cannot send any, nor can I block the spammers who have “friended” me.
   On one fellow Tweeter’s suggestion, I decided to go to Seesmic, which I had joined a while back. Unfortunately, Seesmic has forgotten my username and password. (Don’t you hate it when sites revamp, and they delete their entire database. What’s up with that?)
   And if you connect to Seesmic using your Twitter account, forget it:

   As I said to Nadine Isler, editor of In Business, last week during our interview: I moan about this stuff because I expect the basics to work. I don’t mind if something really complex falls over, but I do have a bit of a problem when I can’t do the main things that the site was set up to do. I have some sympathy toward Twitter, because they are having trouble coping with the growth, but normally when there is a major glitch like this, its staff will blog about it.

Strange errors these past 12 hours on Twitter and Facebook.
   According to Facebook, I only started posting to the wall six hours ago:

And according to Twitter, I am following no one and have no followers, either: Sad, isn’t it? Over 8,000 Tweets and no one wants to listen.

On Twitter today, I notice that Sara Williams, wife of Twitter CEO and co-founder Ev Williams, is a trending topic as she gives birth to their child. Rather than @sara (her Twitter handle) being the topic, people are writing ‘Twitter CEO’s Wife’.

   The above prompted one humorous Tweeter to write, ‘Michael Schumacher is on top of Twitter CEO’s Wife.’

Like Facebook and Twitter, our company has been under DOS attacks for the last few weeks and, as I write, we are under one right now. As for the “Joe job” that the Russians are suspected of having done to a Georgian blogger, I’ve had them, too—just that last year, I had no idea that this was a targeted campaign aimed directly at me or our company. I always thought it was random: like I am important enough to have a coordinated email attack against me. Yeah, right.
   It makes me wonder about the motive. The latest attacks come from the US east coast, which is interesting. The Joe jobs last year emanated from servers in Russia, Poland, Greece, and the US, but the coordinator could have been anywhere.
   You don’t get to 22 years in business without pissing somebody off. The Twitter attack last week was, according to some of the media, from the Russian government, and I can’t think of anyone at that high enough a level to even give a darn about what I do.
   As you know, there are some nut bars out there who have accused me of quite a few far-fetched things (remember the posts about my being racist, against homosexuals, etc.) just because they are too stupid to read what is on the page and imagine I had written something against their point of view. Well, folks, your imaginations might be active, but they diverge too much from reality.
   And if their grasp of reality isn’t that great, then I somehow think they wouldn’t be clever enough to mount an attack.
   So, who would be that keen to waste time on me and has the brains to pull this off? Tongue firmly in cheek, here are the top 10, in no particular order.
   1. Red China. They may be after anyone who has descended from family members who escaped in 1949. Each time I dis Chinese companies about bad behaviour, I will get a negative blog comment, or even a series of them. Seems pretty well coordinated—considering I don’t attract that many blog comments. Never mind that I say nice things about other Chinese companies who don’t do stupid things.
   2. Technocrats and anyone else who wants to get their hands on New Zealand’s remaining state assets. But I am not alone on opposing them and there are more worthy targets.
   3. Sen. John Kerry. It’s to get back at me for my decision to stop buying Wattie’s products because of the company’s overseas ownership. And the occasional quip about how the Forbeses made money in the opium trade. The latest attack did come from Massachusetts. Hmm.
   4. Elle magazine. Its parent company had French defence contracts that were a little incompatible with the fashion image. (It still holds a percentage of EADS.) Folks, I find this funny—and it always gets a laugh in speeches.
   5. Labour leader Phil Goff. I think his latest brochure photo sucks. And it’s probably not cool of him to brag about a free-trade deal with Red China to a roomful of expatriates who left because of 1949. Related to (1).
   6. The ACT Party. Related to (2). Known for sending me spam in 2001 and on numerous occasions afterwards—so they’re definitely a tech-savvy bunch there.
   7. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I’m not the one who talked about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. But I blogged about this a lot last year.
   8. Toyota. So I bring up the war every now and then. However, I eat a lot of Japanese food.
   9. Angelina Jolie. I am living proof that not all heterosexual men find her attractive, keeping her from a perfect hotness score.
   10. Facebook. What I write about what is happening internally must cut pretty closely to the truth.

As my last post read, it is physically impossible for me to follow the user called marcelonz on Twitter. I have tried pressing the ‘follow’ button next to his name on my followers’ page, used the button next to it which gives me four options (one of them being to follow) and even gone to his page and pressed the big ‘Follow’ button.
   By the time I return to either the following or followers’ page, or to Marcelo’s Twitter page, I am back to square one.
   Robin Capper, who is also on Twitter, managed to successfully follow Marcelo without any issue, so once again I have uncovered an error that I can easily duplicate, but almost no one else has it.
   One user, Martha Wade, does have this problem with her own sister’s account, so I am not alone. She was able to follow me and others, and add us to her list—just not her own sister.
   Of course, it could be that Marcelo doesn’t exist at all, and that he is only a figment of my imagination (and Robin’s). The only other way one can find a user to follow is through the following page. Twitter gives the option of ‘add or invite more’ there. So I did.
   When prompted for a username, I tried both marcelonz and @marcelonz. Twitter reports that no such user exists, which may explain why I cannot add him (using either Vista or XP):

   I know, this is a free service, so I should just put up with it, but it’s still annoying!
   Sorry, Marcelo, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to follow you back, but as you can see, it’s out of my hands!