New Thesis Classification

At the meeting with my thesis supervisor two days ago we decided to try another classification for the four main chapters. I found too little on spam to write a whole chapter of a few thousands words on that and basically all spam issues I found were related to following anyway. Therefore spam will be just a subchapter of the larger chapter on following, just like privacy, surveillance and networking. The new chapter will be all about my personal experiences with Twitter and about the people I’ve met through Twitter. So the new classification (but probably not in this specific order) is;

• introduction (general information, remediation and claim)
• applications (one way, two way, multi functional)
• following (privacy, surveillance, netiquette, networking)
• experience (meeting people, addiction and quiting)
• language (140 characters, neologisms, linguistics)
• conclusion (getting back to positions)
  

And although I no longer tweet I still have interactions with Twitter users, because they are my friends or because I meet them around town, like yesterday I met @ikbendaf again who writes a book about Twitter. She tried to get me back on Twitter but I am still clean but a bit more enthusiastic about my research and thesis. For now I have to write four introductions and should probably start on experience as I am still cold turkey after quiting Twitter after months of intensively tweeting. In the mean time I should think of positions I have to take about the subjects in my main chapters.

The Bird and the Worm

Recently I don’t hang around on Twitter anymore, due to personal reasons and I have to focus on other parts of my research now. After March 25 I only posted two tweets (actually three but I deleted one) but they are not showing up on my page, anyway, I post them here then;

http://twitpic.com/2lm3x – proefmodel voor nieuwe schoenen (veterlaarsjes), uit één stuk leer 12:24 AM Mar 30th from TwitPic

@vreer oh! we got to talk about The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence tomorrow (now look what you did, you made me tweet ‘n sweat) 1:13 AM Apr 3rd from web in reply to vreer

These are my last tweets and I’ve got so much time left since I don’t read tweets of my friends anymore. I do however see some tweets on Facebook in my friend feed though. The first few days I did miss my daily shot of tweets but when I read them now I don’t think the major part of them is very useful. I wish there was some applications or filter that only shows me useful tweets. I could filter on keywords but that’s not enough for me as I don’t know what tweets could be useful until I read them.

Another thing that’s bugging me is the huge amount of notifications I get lately from Twitter about new followers. A few days ago I got ‘only’ 94 notifications that @doesje started to follow me but since two days I received 1135 notifications that @mcula is following me. The e-mails gather up in groups of 61 and I think that’s due to Gmail, check this out;

Luckily I have some filters there so my inbox is not overflowing. The strange thing is that I also get notifications of other users only once and those notifications are being forwarded to Twimailer. Maybe I should block @mcula to stop these notifications from coming in or notify Twitter? Just today I received an e-mail from a friend which said there’s a worm active on Twitter (StalkDaily-worm) and this could be the source of my overflow of follow notifications. So Twitter gets eaten by a worm, while I always thought birds eat worms?

Exploring Other Worlds

Sometimes I feel the more I read about Twitter (the company or the service/website), the less I know about them. Most articles I read are about the four main topics of my research though, applications, following, language and spam. Next to Twitter there are similar systems that are less closed than Twitter and interchangeable, meaning that one message transfers to another service, something like retweeting yourself somewhere else on the web. Although this could be seen as spam, when users only use Twitter or any other microblog as a mirror. Two examples of Twitter clones are The Twit Army and smallpicture.com. David Sarno argues that;

[t]he software they’re using was developed by Evan Prodromou, a developer in Montreal. Prodromou is the force behind Laconica — an open-source, Twitter-like system that anyone can install; hundreds of administrators already have, creating a dispersed, decentralized network of Twitter clones that can all talk to one another.

Prodromou compares the state of micro-messaging to the early days of consumer e-mail. In the early 1990s, the e-mail world was dominated by proprietary dial-up entities like CompuServe, MCI and Prodigy. But because those systems were competitive, they didn’t connect to one another, and you could send messages only to people inside your own service.

“I couldn’t send you e-mail and you couldn’t send me e-mail,” Prodromou explained. “We were on these separate islands. Making the change to an open standard for Internet e-mail has meant e-mail has become ubiquitous. I think that’s where we’re at now with microblogging”.[1]

Basically users want to be able to communicate from one system to another without the limits of one system that has a monopoly. Here lies the power of web 2.0, where a lot of social network sites are linked together. Besides a connection between users, web 2.0 applications like Twitter and its clones they are external aids to enhance our cognitive abilities. On the other hand I could extend the notion of Socrates, who argued two thousand years ago that books would destroy thought. What would he think of messages that flow around in cyberspace between users, or blogs. Socrates was against books as they were static, there’s no one to interrupt or ask questions, the author of the book isn’t there.[2] On Twitter however the written words are there, just like the author, who can respond when replied to.

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[1] Sarno, David. “Twitter has followers who want to lead.” LA Times. Posted on March 24^th, read on March 27^th.
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/03/theres-twitter.html>

[2] Norman, Donald A. Things That Make Us Smart. Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Boston, Addison-Wesley: 1993: 44.

Thesis Proposal, 1st version

Important possibilities in Twitter are being reflected in the variety of platforms, websites, devices and programs that can generate messages that are being sent to Twitter itself and then simultaneously and real-time being distributed to several (other) websites, devices and programs. Why is there such a growth in external applications? This research is giving an overview of applications and the use of spam and linguistics within Twitter. The features this website offers and the uses of the RSS feeds have many possibilities and implications. What are its relations to older technologies and what are its uses, could Twitter be a remediation of older technologies or do we need new concepts?

Phishing on Twitter

Even Twitter cannot escape the touch of criminals on the Internet, like website of banks they too are a victim of phishing now and wrote a warning about this on their blog this weekend. According to Wikipedia  phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. In this situation an criminal organization is sending users a message with a link where they should click on and this way are being redirected to a false portal and asked for their password. This false website has an url that ends with ‘access-logins.com’ and has been used before in other actions. When the criminals have the username and password they can send direct messages from the hacked account and trick followers to go to the false website. Twitter proactively blocked some users and reset their password. If a user uses Twitter not through the website they wouldn’t know this warning Twitter wrote on their site about the act of phishing or that their password has been reset. Anyway, always be careful when receiving an email that looks suspicious and has a link that redirects to Twitter or any other social network site. Please use your browser bookmark.

Spam on Twitter

Still Twitter shows me surprises every day, I managed to have my tweets transported to my blog on Livejournal and still working on Twitterfeed to work. This should transport blog entries to Twitter. I am still curious why I follow some people who don’t follow me and people who do follow me but I don’t know. But besides that, today three people added me to their list but when I check them they have weird arbitrary usernames and no other users follow them. The three ‘users’ are darcyxl6hu, yasukocibz and shaezi9stx and I already blocked two of them. On their userpages there’s just one tweet with an url that invites me to register on Perfspot.com. It looks like some kind of Social Network Site to me. Maybe I should register and check it out? This website doesn’t let go of me though, when I try to close my browser window I get a pop-up saying some girl wants to chat with me. The question is, why did these users follow me and why today? What keyword did I use today or before that triggered them to follow me? Do other users have this kind of spam too? I did check the other real users that are being followed by these bots (that’s what I think they are) but didn’t find any keywords that match mine.