From: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351283,00.asp
The popular microblogging site Twitter went down early Thursday morning, with the site's operators confirming the outage on a status blog as a denial-of-service attack.
Twitter originally offered no explanation for the outage, adding a characteristically pithy post on its Status blog titled, simply, "Site is Down". "We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," the post read.
Shortly thereafter, however, the site confirmed that it was suffering a denial-of-service attack. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the site read.
There's no wondering if this outage will spark fresh discussion of cyber-security and counter-cyber-terrorism efforts. The question is how much discussion will it spark...
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The Day the Twitter Died
I'd gotten up this morning and read an article by Robert Scoble on unfollowing people.
To be honest, I thought, oh great, yet another article by the in-the-know, internet intelligensia about why you shouldn't be following people like me, who may not really offer the sort of Twitter ROI that is important. Or is it important (to me) ?
It must not be- for me. I've been languishing at approximately the 400 user mark for a while now. I continue to tweet the beers I drink each night, provided sporadic twitter race-day coverage of Ironman Lake Placid, comments on the Tour de France, and frequently add tweets on politics, technology, and even the Daily Show. Taken as an aggregate, there's probably something not to like in my stream for just about any of my followers.
Twitter is at once this great democratizing force, unless Twitter decides to 'rationalize' the tweet-stream, which has been discussed by Twitter recently, and this obsessive playground for control-freaks. Who follows you, who you are following, how many are there, what's the value, and other questions are constant discussion points on Twitter, and that's fine. But I think there is maybe to much ROI on something that is basically free- or free plus the cost of the time you put into it.
However, I found the article really actually useful. There's nothing wrong with using Twitter whatever way you like to- as a communication tool, a means of self-expression, a resource for answers to your questions. Complain, philosophize, agitate, even market. it's all good. But there's no reason to handicap your account and your experience, either.
Example- your bio line. Mine said almost nothing about me except that I like Battlestar Galactica. While this is true, it doesn't tell you who I am, what I do, or what I tweet about. So, as the article suggested, I changed it.
Then I sat back, made this one change, interested to see what might happen.
And Twitter took a giant face plant a few minutes later. It's been down about two hours now, I think, and yeah, here I am, writing about it being down on my blog, partially because you can't tweet about twitter being down. You can, however, go to http://istwitterdown.com for a status update.
Anyway, read the article. I think there are some great tips for being as 'good' a twitter user as you decide you want to be.
To be honest, I thought, oh great, yet another article by the in-the-know, internet intelligensia about why you shouldn't be following people like me, who may not really offer the sort of Twitter ROI that is important. Or is it important (to me) ?
It must not be- for me. I've been languishing at approximately the 400 user mark for a while now. I continue to tweet the beers I drink each night, provided sporadic twitter race-day coverage of Ironman Lake Placid, comments on the Tour de France, and frequently add tweets on politics, technology, and even the Daily Show. Taken as an aggregate, there's probably something not to like in my stream for just about any of my followers.
Twitter is at once this great democratizing force, unless Twitter decides to 'rationalize' the tweet-stream, which has been discussed by Twitter recently, and this obsessive playground for control-freaks. Who follows you, who you are following, how many are there, what's the value, and other questions are constant discussion points on Twitter, and that's fine. But I think there is maybe to much ROI on something that is basically free- or free plus the cost of the time you put into it.
However, I found the article really actually useful. There's nothing wrong with using Twitter whatever way you like to- as a communication tool, a means of self-expression, a resource for answers to your questions. Complain, philosophize, agitate, even market. it's all good. But there's no reason to handicap your account and your experience, either.
Example- your bio line. Mine said almost nothing about me except that I like Battlestar Galactica. While this is true, it doesn't tell you who I am, what I do, or what I tweet about. So, as the article suggested, I changed it.
Then I sat back, made this one change, interested to see what might happen.
And Twitter took a giant face plant a few minutes later. It's been down about two hours now, I think, and yeah, here I am, writing about it being down on my blog, partially because you can't tweet about twitter being down. You can, however, go to http://istwitterdown.com for a status update.
Anyway, read the article. I think there are some great tips for being as 'good' a twitter user as you decide you want to be.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
On Social Media and Pen Pals
After reading this article from Charles Arthur about a study supposing (and not much more) a link between Twitter and Cancer in which he recounted a fellow Twitterer's comment 'it's a problem of paucity of language - we don't have a word for friends you haven't met and might never meet in person.'
I tweeted him the following: 'people used to have friends they never met. they just sent letters, not tweets. all of this has happened before. just slower'
Leaving aside my obsessive need to misuse the first half of the mantra from BSG, I was of course talking about pen pals. Yeah, that crazy quaint custom of being matched up with some complete stranger in some far away never-never land (like Paris, or Idaho) and exchanging letter. People used to do that- honest. Google it. You don't get anything involving 'prison' until the fifth hit...
The first point here is I read a good piece by a good journalist- whose new articles I find out about via his tweets- and tweeted him back. You know all those times you've read something in a magazine or the paper and swore you were going to write that person and...
How often have you done it ?
And he responded.
Which really isn't the point. The point of the original article was that our lack of closeness and intimacy, that being solitary, leads to a higher cancer rate through some sort of genetic pseudo-link. The point of Charles Arthur's article was to point out that the 'science' basically wasn't in what's normally a peer reviewed journal. Going a step further, there's the question of just what these online interactions really mean. Clearly the journal article's authors see these online interactions as having zero value towards social interconnectedness, and while I think you could argue that, it seems like that would be piling fuzzy science on top. And I'd disagree...
But that comment about paucity of language got me thinking to while I was running. Social media is a really mixed bag and some social media 1.0 tools really did a lot of damage to our language. I'm talking about texting, which I have never really adopted- and you can tell, because when I do text you, it will be with complete words, not l8r brb gtg.
Twitter forces you to be concise, yes. I love to write, and at times I find its 140 character limitation stifling. But I actually see it as a challenge, editing my overlong tweets down, like a word-level version of Scrabble. They are still complete thoughts, compact, but complete, and I find that the people I follow tend to do the same. Well-worded, even euridite, just in that 140 character word space.
I think this also helps Twitter to be more social than that other social media 1.0 flaming ground, the message board. Too many message boards (and no, not just the Hitek running board) turn into the landing ground for people with questionable social skills and a desire to turn the internet into a virtual verbal sort of Fight Club. Except that everyone talks about this fight club. If you find yourself reliving the glory of your past tweets or holding grudges against other tweeters, you probably aren't using Twitter right.
Twitter really is an interesting tool, and I'd argue that it doesn't lead to less social interaction. Or a paucity of language-and to be fair, that's not what the original commenter Charles Arthur mentioned in his article was suggesting. But social media is often mocked for a disturbing dilution of social interaction- 'friends' on Facebook, 'followers' on Twitter. But I disagree. On twitter I've made people laugh, provided emotional support, solved people's technical problems, acted and interacted with the famous, the funny, the president, and most of all, the intelligent. The power of social media is the speed with which you can tap the collective intelligent of a group consciousness for feedback and knowledge.
And it's also how I stay in touch- and feel connected to- one of my close friends, who is across the country and also in IT. Our tweets span topics technical, philosophical, and beerical.
Is it a replacement for real human interaction ? Of course not. Is it an augmentation ? Maybe.
Does it cause cancer ? I doubt it...
I tweeted him the following: 'people used to have friends they never met. they just sent letters, not tweets. all of this has happened before. just slower'
Leaving aside my obsessive need to misuse the first half of the mantra from BSG, I was of course talking about pen pals. Yeah, that crazy quaint custom of being matched up with some complete stranger in some far away never-never land (like Paris, or Idaho) and exchanging letter. People used to do that- honest. Google it. You don't get anything involving 'prison' until the fifth hit...
The first point here is I read a good piece by a good journalist- whose new articles I find out about via his tweets- and tweeted him back. You know all those times you've read something in a magazine or the paper and swore you were going to write that person and...
How often have you done it ?
And he responded.
Which really isn't the point. The point of the original article was that our lack of closeness and intimacy, that being solitary, leads to a higher cancer rate through some sort of genetic pseudo-link. The point of Charles Arthur's article was to point out that the 'science' basically wasn't in what's normally a peer reviewed journal. Going a step further, there's the question of just what these online interactions really mean. Clearly the journal article's authors see these online interactions as having zero value towards social interconnectedness, and while I think you could argue that, it seems like that would be piling fuzzy science on top. And I'd disagree...
But that comment about paucity of language got me thinking to while I was running. Social media is a really mixed bag and some social media 1.0 tools really did a lot of damage to our language. I'm talking about texting, which I have never really adopted- and you can tell, because when I do text you, it will be with complete words, not l8r brb gtg.
Twitter forces you to be concise, yes. I love to write, and at times I find its 140 character limitation stifling. But I actually see it as a challenge, editing my overlong tweets down, like a word-level version of Scrabble. They are still complete thoughts, compact, but complete, and I find that the people I follow tend to do the same. Well-worded, even euridite, just in that 140 character word space.
I think this also helps Twitter to be more social than that other social media 1.0 flaming ground, the message board. Too many message boards (and no, not just the Hitek running board) turn into the landing ground for people with questionable social skills and a desire to turn the internet into a virtual verbal sort of Fight Club. Except that everyone talks about this fight club. If you find yourself reliving the glory of your past tweets or holding grudges against other tweeters, you probably aren't using Twitter right.
Twitter really is an interesting tool, and I'd argue that it doesn't lead to less social interaction. Or a paucity of language-and to be fair, that's not what the original commenter Charles Arthur mentioned in his article was suggesting. But social media is often mocked for a disturbing dilution of social interaction- 'friends' on Facebook, 'followers' on Twitter. But I disagree. On twitter I've made people laugh, provided emotional support, solved people's technical problems, acted and interacted with the famous, the funny, the president, and most of all, the intelligent. The power of social media is the speed with which you can tap the collective intelligent of a group consciousness for feedback and knowledge.
And it's also how I stay in touch- and feel connected to- one of my close friends, who is across the country and also in IT. Our tweets span topics technical, philosophical, and beerical.
Is it a replacement for real human interaction ? Of course not. Is it an augmentation ? Maybe.
Does it cause cancer ? I doubt it...
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I have a My Space Account ?
On Monday, I'd taken half a day, part of a sort of yearly Baatan Vacation March, where I try to cram 15-20 days of vacation time into 30 or so work days.
I have this impression that between 12-1 PM every day, my phone must ring a lot. I don't get this. I have what I know is a warped idea of the 'lunch hour' but I keep thinking people will one day understand- I've been there ten years- that I won't be there during lunch. It was an emergency- someone needed pictures of eight retiring professors for a ceremony to be held in three hours.
So I rushed around getting digital images, but there were two people I didn't have ID card photos of. So I turned to my full-time assistant, er, I mean Google. I found one professor's photo on a CS server that several people have sworn was disconnected from the network, had a stake driven through its hard drive, and its ashes spread on the wind. They lied. The other professor- I found him on something called Spock.com (beta). This seems to be one of the internet's endless directories, so I did what most people desperate to get the hell out of work and start a run in 40 mph wind would do. I typed in my own name.
Damn that guy in New Zealand that has been using my name his entire life.
But seriously, I found myself. And there was a link to my My Space page. This was news to me. I have a Facebook page, which is a weird collage, since I hijacked it from a college kid that was using my email address for it. Don't know why he did this, but when I started getting friend requests for people I'd never heard of in my work email, I used the lost password feature to hijack the account. My feeling was that if someone was going to be posting drunken, naked pictures to Facebook under my name, it would be me (just kidding- there are NO drunken naked pictures). Most of my 'friends' are people I've never heard of, who invite me to install apps that I have no time to determine the functionality of. But Bove is there...
I must have set the My Space page up at the same time to avoid further dilution of my trademark. There was a picture of me from IM Lake Placid. And I have a friend named 'Tom.' Funny, I only know a few Toms, none of whom live in California. I don't remember setting it up.
And this, this is the internet for so many of us. Footprints we leave in what we think is the sand. Only it's not sand. It's wet cement, and every step is recorded, preserved (until the IPO goes belly-up at least). The big sites- the Facebooks, the My Spaces, the Twitters, they are not going anywhere. Nor are the things you've put there. Oh yeah, like this blog. It's not a bad idea to remember that.
You know that advice your Mom or Dad or other adult authority figure gave you ? "If you can't say something nice..." Sometimes, it's okay to be critical, but before you open the floodgates of negativity, you might want to wonder about what you'll forget that will turn up in a search engine somewhere...
I have this impression that between 12-1 PM every day, my phone must ring a lot. I don't get this. I have what I know is a warped idea of the 'lunch hour' but I keep thinking people will one day understand- I've been there ten years- that I won't be there during lunch. It was an emergency- someone needed pictures of eight retiring professors for a ceremony to be held in three hours.
So I rushed around getting digital images, but there were two people I didn't have ID card photos of. So I turned to my full-time assistant, er, I mean Google. I found one professor's photo on a CS server that several people have sworn was disconnected from the network, had a stake driven through its hard drive, and its ashes spread on the wind. They lied. The other professor- I found him on something called Spock.com (beta). This seems to be one of the internet's endless directories, so I did what most people desperate to get the hell out of work and start a run in 40 mph wind would do. I typed in my own name.
Damn that guy in New Zealand that has been using my name his entire life.
But seriously, I found myself. And there was a link to my My Space page. This was news to me. I have a Facebook page, which is a weird collage, since I hijacked it from a college kid that was using my email address for it. Don't know why he did this, but when I started getting friend requests for people I'd never heard of in my work email, I used the lost password feature to hijack the account. My feeling was that if someone was going to be posting drunken, naked pictures to Facebook under my name, it would be me (just kidding- there are NO drunken naked pictures). Most of my 'friends' are people I've never heard of, who invite me to install apps that I have no time to determine the functionality of. But Bove is there...
I must have set the My Space page up at the same time to avoid further dilution of my trademark. There was a picture of me from IM Lake Placid. And I have a friend named 'Tom.' Funny, I only know a few Toms, none of whom live in California. I don't remember setting it up.
And this, this is the internet for so many of us. Footprints we leave in what we think is the sand. Only it's not sand. It's wet cement, and every step is recorded, preserved (until the IPO goes belly-up at least). The big sites- the Facebooks, the My Spaces, the Twitters, they are not going anywhere. Nor are the things you've put there. Oh yeah, like this blog. It's not a bad idea to remember that.
You know that advice your Mom or Dad or other adult authority figure gave you ? "If you can't say something nice..." Sometimes, it's okay to be critical, but before you open the floodgates of negativity, you might want to wonder about what you'll forget that will turn up in a search engine somewhere...
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