I understand people who know each other following each other. That’s like RSS, right?
I don’t quite get how Twitter spam is supposed to work. Assuming some idiot start following *me* – how does that help them? Perhaps I click on their feed which is essentially full of ads and follow a link elsewhere? Perhaps.
What I also don’t get is apparent interests starting to follow me. What is @emacs doing following me? Is it a person? A name stealer? A topic? Something communal? Do we have shared ownership?
Weirdness.
#Web #Emacs
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Spammers use Twitter because all those people they follow boost their Pagerank. That’s it, really. It’s one of the (many) abuses and loopholes in the way Google works that Google needs to fix, and soon.
What makes Twitter so special is that it’s very, *very* easy to Follow other folks; in effect, you’re listening into conversations in a crowded room and can jump into topics (and out again) at any time, including with folks who are complete strangers. Some of whome might later become friends. Think of it as a pre-social network 😄
Add to that it’s ability to merge real folks with rss-like automatic feeds and tools and you’ve got something that’s both simple, and one of the cleverest, most ingenious sites I’m ever used.
– GreyWulf 2008-05-09 19:41 UTC
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I’m just looking at @rms and shaking my head in laughter. This fake uses RMS’ portrait and spews insults left and right. That *has* to violate a law somewhere...
– Alex Schroeder 2008-05-09 19:58 UTC
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Are you *sure* it’s not really Stallman? :D :D :D
– GreyWulf 2008-05-09 20:35 UTC
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I created the @emacs account, mainly to ensure that a community member had it, so if someone in #emacs or wherever thinks of something to do with it, I can make it available for that.
Any ideas what we should do with it?
– Edward O'Connor 2008-05-09 21:12 UTC
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I guess if we really wanted to, we could build a bot that follows us and collects statements mentioning #emacs somewhere – PlanetEmacsen or something related.
– Alex Schroeder 2008-05-09 21:21 UTC