The Industry Review

Since it’s a four part story, here are links to the other parts.
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media (Part 1 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: The Sting (Part 2 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Cybercrime (Part 3 of 4)

This is the conclusion of the events that took place in 1991.

 
One day, right after I logged in as Solarwind, I found myself in a large room filled with wizards. What was going on? A wizard by the name of Destruction (whom I knew and was even my friend!) claimed that they know what I’m up to, that I’m cheating by helping a user. They demanded an explanation!

 
I was shocked! I got caught! In retrospect, I know they caught me easily. It wasn’t that hard to see that a wizard and a player were constantly together. Turns out that Destruction was sent on a mission to spy on me: he followed me invisibly and saw what I was doing. Of course, there was an easy way for Solarwind to see invisible wizards… but I didn’t know it at the time.

 
However, my paranoia did pay off. Because I logged in from two separate countries (separate continents, actually), they still believed these are two individuals: one Israeli and one American. I still don’t know how this fooled them: couldn’t they see we never talked? ever? What, we were telepathic?!

 
So I confessed, yes, I cheated. Yet I still didn’t tell them I was just one person.

 
The council of wizards told me that my punishment would be given within 24 hours. In retrospect, these wizards were pretty formal… I imagine a group of chubby computer science geeks/student corresponding about technicalities and legalities. Though that was in the “real” world – in the MUD they were powerful and almighty entities.

 
I believed that they would delete both Solarwind and Thor. Consequently, I still had a day to be a wizard – so I decided to use my powers for good, to make the MUD a better place. From now on, I am not Solarwind… I am Solarhood (y’know, like Robin Hood?). I shall steal from the wealthy and give to the poor.

 
I went out and found people to help. I went to the shop – which was magically shielded, but could not stop me – and stole all the weapons and armor and gave it away. I created vast amount of gold and gave it to the people. I healed the weak, cured the blind, turned frogs to humans, kissed babies and hugged widows. I did a lot of good things that day. I wanted my downfall to mean something.

 
Then I bid farewell to Solarwind and logged off.

 
The next day I connected and heard the following story: apparently the council had no plans of deleting either Solarwind or Thor. They planned to return Thor to – roughly – the state he was in when Solarwind started helping him, and just issue a warning to Solarwind.

 
However, since I caused quite a riot, they decided to permanently suspend Solarwind (for my nefarious activities. They did NOT approve of my benevolent actions!), and “only” demote Thor to his previous level.

 
Oh yes, I was told, they had to laboriously go through all the MUD logs and nullify everything I’ve done: cancel all the gold I created, take away all the weapons I handed out. It was hard, but they were able to do it.

 
All my good deeds were stripped away. Solarhood was caught, the Man won.

 
I could still log in as Thor but from that moment I lost all motivation to play. I never became a wizard in that MUD. Though, as I briefly mentioned, a few years later I did become one in other MUDs (the internet connection dramatically improved by then – and apparently, most MUDs were vastly easier).

 
Sometimes I wonder what happened to the real Solarwind. My guess: nothing. I’m pretty confident the original player probably never even heard of this episode. And if he did, he must’ve been quite amused of this story.

 
Strangely, after these events I took on myself the Solarwind persona. To this day – two decades! – I often register in forums and other sites as Solarwind. I guess I liked the Solarhood aspect so much I decided to take it with me.. It just feels right. Though I do plan to return it if the original Solarwind wants it back…

Since it’s a four part story, here are links to the other parts.
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media (Part 1 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: The Sting (Part 2 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Crime and Punishment (Part 4 of 4)

 
(I’ve decided to speed up the posting of this event. Since it’s long, I will still chop it to one more part, and will post this and the other post today. There are other things I want to discuss and I don’t like posting more than a post a day…)

 
This time no recap. If you’ve gotten here, I assume you read part 2.

 
As I was saying, I was becoming increasingly nervous that I won’t make it, so decided to pull a sting.

 
Note that the following took place in 1990-1991, when I was already familiar with MUDs for a while. Also note that this was prior to the creation of the World Wide Web, so the whole concept of cybercrime was pretty much in its infancy. And also, I was a minor 😉 I would not have done this today.

 
With that in mind, I will continue.

 
As I mentioned before, there were many MUDs. The vast majority of them originated from the same code. Every MUD creator took the code, made changes, and expanded on it. However, in almost all of them there were regions that were identical – these were the areas that were created in the original MUD.

 
Usually MUDs grew a lot like real world cities do. The first domains created by wizards would surround the original city, and every new addition was placed farther and farther away. Though some wizards used to outsmart this by doing something creative, like placing a closet in one of the original rooms which would take you to their realm if you entered it (obviously, inspired by the Narnia series).

 
In my MUD, one area was right next to the entrance. I was playing for more than a year at the time, and during the entire period there was no change – it was clearly abandoned. There was absolutely nothing going on there. After investigating this, I found out it was created by a wizard name Solarwind whom I knew (there was a way of checking) had not logged in for years. Since at the time virtually all internet access originated in academic institutions, my guess was that he simply graduated and moved on. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that was the case.

 
Considering his vanishing and the fact his area was so close to the entrance, my theory was that Solarwind must’ve been one of the original founders of the MUD.

 
I decided I would try and “borrow” his account in order to help Thor reach Wizardhood – and then I would abandon it. I’m not going to say “steal” since I genuinely intended only to use it to advance my own character. Time was running out and I had to do something!

 
Since it was obvious Solarwind was long gone, I was certain he would not even know it, and where he was he probably wouldn’t even care. Listen, I was under a lot of pressure, I had to get this done! We’re talking addiction here.

 
I didn’t know how much information MUD administrators had on users, so I decided to be cautious. I had access to an American account (through a friend of my father) and I used telnet (nice to see some things haven’t changed in 2 decades – telnet is the same as it was back then) to log in to the MUD from that account.

 
This is a good time to mention that every MUD had a God. Meaning, the person who literally owned the MUD – set it up and maintained it. I imagine most MUD Gods were geeky, computer science students in real life. But to us… they were gods! They could do everything! They could even raise the dead – NOTHING was beyond their reach.

 
I guessed that Solarwind must’ve been a friend of the MUD’s God because he was one of the original founders. Yes, this was all a series of speculations, but I decided to risk it.

 
So one day, when the God materialized in the MUD, I logged in through my American account, and created a user by the name of “Solarwin”.

 
I sent the God a message “Hey buddy, long time no see! How are you?”.

 
[my heart was beating like crazy]

 
He responded: “I’m good, and yourself?”

 
[I couldn’t believe it!]

 
I said: “Things are great here. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I haven’t been here for so long that I can’t remember my password anymore. Can you help me out?”

 
[Every second felt like hours]

 
He responded: “Sure, no problem”.

 
And before I knew it… I was Solarwind. I was an immortal force of nature, I wielded powers beyond even the mightiest of mortals. I logged in and found myself in Solarwind’s personal chamber (all wizards had one, it’s where they had guests come over. Seriously). My plan worked!

 
With the year’s 2010 perspective, I know that what I did was Phishing. I don’t know when this term was coined, but I probably did it way before. This was 1991.

 
Again, just so you won’t judge me: I was just a teen at the time, it was a victimless crime, and I intended to abandon Solarwind’s account once I’m done. And don’t they say addicts will do everything to get their next fix? I just had to do this.

 
Immediately I proceeded with my plan. To my great disappointment, I found out that it’s much harder to be a wizard than I realized. And worse, I could not ask anyone for help. There was no one to guide me nor were there tutorials.

 
A few years later I became (legitimately) a wizard in a different MUD, so in hindsight I know what I did was incredibly clumsy and awkward. I could’ve accomplished my goal so easily – but I barely knew what I was doing.

 
What I did was log in to both Thor (my real account) and Solarwind simultaneously – each from a different country – and have Solarwind constantly provide information to Thor on how he could defeat monsters. Even then I knew that in principle Solarwind could’ve made weapons that would kill any monster on a hit – but would be caught. He could heal Thor – but would be caught. He could bring every monster to the point of death and allow Thor to “finish it off” – but would be caught. So I did the only thing I knew is safe.

 
I also used Solarwind to gather intel and objects from places unreachable. I even manufactured one of the items needed for a quest – I suspected this won’t raise any red flags.

 
Slowly – yet much faster than before – I was approaching my goal… Thor was becoming very close to becoming a wizard. Then I could really do things the right way.

 
Yet I failed. I was caught.

Since it’s a four part story, here are links to the other parts.
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media (Part 1 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Cybercrime (Part 3 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Crime and Punishment (Part 4 of 4)

 
This is the sequel to “The Prehistoric Times of Social Media” post. Quick recap: in the previous post I elaborated why social media is not a new phenomenon and in fact, was already alive and kicking back in the mid 80s in various forms, notably BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) and MUDs (Multi User Domains). MUDs are the prehistoric ancestors of massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPGs) like World of Warcarft, in the sense that every user created a fantasy character, fought monsters, gained experience, solved quests, cast spells, etc – all in order to advance in levels and become more powerful. However, MUDs had a huge advantage over modern games: once a user got to a certain point (level 20) he would become a “Wizard”, the MUD equivalent of an administrator. Then he would be allowed to program his own realm in the MUD universe with any theme or concept he had in mind.

 
This background, while interesting in its own right (I hope?), was necessary in order to share this story.

 
Just like many modern gamers are obsessed – even addicted – to these games (I even dedicated a post on how to break this addiction). I became obsessed with becoming a MUD wizard. I just had to! There was something almost magical in becoming one. Whereas previously you were just a player – as a wizard you could do anything: teleport anywhere you wanted, become invisible, pull pranks (well, you weren’t supposed to), be invulnerable. Since I spent so much time in the game, gaining these… super powers.. would’ve felt almost real. I planned to be a kind and benevolent wizard. Create easy and imaginative areas that would be fun and reward players.

 
Since I was living in Israel at the time, playing MUDs was a major problem. The internet connection of the entire country was flaky and unreliable. Often the connection would just die for a while. Could be a few minutes, could be a few hours. But it happened a lot. Therefore, playing the game was not easy.

 
Some MUDs required a LOT of effort in order to reach “wizardhood”, in particular, the one I describe. I had to skip class a few times. Quite often I used to spend the entire night playing. Unlike today, I had to physically go to a local university and connect from there (I still remember the expression of the night guard who caught me one night… utter shock. He just looked at me and went away). There was even one missile attack sent by Saddam Hussein during the first gulf war… instead of sitting home with a gas mask, I was at the university, trying to kill monsters. Death by biological and chemical weapons? Ha, worth the risk if it means I become a wizard.

 
Because of the unreliable connection, death was a sad fact of life. I always became furious when in the midst of a terrible combat, the connection died, and when it returned a few minutes afterwards, I found myself as a ghost hovering above the body of Thor (my character). Yes, MUDs had an amusing concept of ghosts.. it was necessary to go to a location and pray in order to be resurrected. Every death resulted in a major setback and it particularly frustrated me since often it was not my fault at all!

 
A friend and I came up with a solution: we will establish an Israeli MUD! We sent a proposal to the person in charge of the internet connection in Israel at the time. He got so angry at us for even coming up with this suggestion, that he blocked port 2000 – the port used for MUD connection – for the entire country. Imagine a single person pulling off something like this now… Of course, we easily found a way around this limitation and continued playing, but till this day, there has never been an Israeli MUD to my knowledge.

 
So I continued playing, often dying for reasons out of my control. And time went by.

 
As you probably know, in Israel military service is compulsory. By the age of 18, everyone must enlist for 3 years (men) and 2 years (women). I became increasingly nervous that despite my best efforts, I will be drafted and still not become a wizard.

 
Therefore, I decided to take action. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

 
I decided to pull a sting.

 
It was dangerous and risky, but I just couldn’t accept my dream not turning to a reality.

Ancient PC

This post was partially inspired by Darren Williger’s keynote speech at Social Media 201.

 
Despite the fact it’s a common perception that social media is a new phenomenon, it’s actually far from. Both Darren and myself have been using the Internet since the 80s. We ran a small competition: turns out that if you Google us, the earliest result is mine (from 1989!) though Darren was active online about 2-3 years before I was. So it’s a draw ;-).

 
Back then the online world was very different. In the mid 80s BBSs (Bulletin board systems) were what we all used. These were phone-based systems, usually run by individuals, though some companies had their own, that enabled people to connect using dial-up modems. They were infinitely slower than today’s internet, and all text based, but they were awesome!

 
BBSs included forums, multiplayer games (though not real time ones), downloadable computer games (yep, some two decades before Bittorrent) and a lot more. In other words, we all interacted, and much of the content was user generated. Sounds to me a lot like…social Media and Web 2.0. Of course, this wasn’t Web 2.0 because this was almost a decade before the World Wide Web (Web 1.0?) was created! Though BBSs weren’t a part of the internet, they offered much of what the internet could offer at the time.

 
When I first starting using the internet, in 1987 or 1988 (I need to figure this out one day…), I stopped using BBSs. The internet had so much potential! My friends and I actually didn’t refer to it as the internet back then but rather as the Bitnet (which was always a subset of the internet but was separately accessible at the time). When I look at old emails that are archived online, we actually referred to the internet as the InterNet. How quaint! Amusingly, there was a local news story about us at the time: “Local teenagers chat with people all over the world using computers”. It sounds ridiculous now, but it was very “exotic” back then.

 
Bitnet email accounts were very simple: mine was nyschles@weizmann (yeah, no .com, .net or whatever). The internet equivalent was nyschles@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il though I rarely used it at the time.

 
Not long after I had my first chat (using Relay – the ancestor of IRC which itself had a multiple offspring from multiple “wives”: chat rooms, various messengers – even chat roulette). I was introduced to a radical concept called MUDs (Multi User Domains). MUDs are the prehistoric ancestors of massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Ultima Online. There were several variations of the concept: some were created for social interaction (the modern equivalent is Second Life), other for gaming, etc.

 
MUDs were just as fun as modern games, despite the fact that the vast majority were text based. However, in a way they were far superior to even the most modern of these games. How so?

 
The type of MUD I used was called an LPMud. This was a classic multiplayer online game: once you registered, you were given a character that would have to fight monsters and get experience points to advance in levels. Depending on the MUD itself (there were hundreds, all run by individuals and as far as I know, hosted at universities), you could choose a class (i.e. a wizard, a druid, a fighter), have spells, and a do whole lot of different things. I’m sure this sounds very similar to anyone who has played World of Warcraft or similar games.

 
The difference is – and that is a huge, enormous difference – is that all MUDs were based on user generated content.

 
Once a character reached his 20th level and has done his share of quests, he became a “Wizard”. Wizards weren’t players anymore.. but were more like MUD administrators. Each was given permission to program a part of the MUD – his domain. Most Wizards created an area with a theme: I remember Castle Dracula, Sesame Street, Star wars, and basically everything you can imagine.

 
User generated content? Web 2.0? in the late 80s?! These terms were used long after these events despite the fact this was decades before they became mainstream.

 
Even today, you still can’t do the equivalent with games such as World of Warcraft (though I do remember that a few years ago, a group of people was able to successfully replicate EverQuest’s framework and protocols and effectively recreated a home-brew version without Sony’s permission).

 
It may really surprise people who started using computers when the internet was already ubiquitous, but back then, things were just as fun despite the technological limitations. There was no spam either!

 
I hope you found this history lesson interesting ;). Although this post can be read on its own, I gave it for a reason – in order to be able to share an event that took place at the time. Read my next posts for more details.

 
Here are links to the other parts.
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: The Sting (Part 2 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Cybercrime (Part 3 of 4)
The Prehistoric Times of Social Media: Crime and Punishment (Part 4 of 4)

Somehow often my best posts involve videos by Darren Williger. Darren created a “behind the scenes” video summarizing our experiences at Social Media 201 which I just had to share (my own perspective is described in this post).

 
I barely appear in this video (fine with me!), part of because Darren’s camera had a hiccup during my talk.. and when I do appear, from some reason I’m whispering (not sure what was going through my mind…). Also featured are Darren, Bille Baty, Jeff Dance, Joe Kennedy, Eric Weaver, Kris Ruby – and even the SeattleWineGal.

Ashton Kutcher with 0 followers

Yesterday, I logged on to my Twitter account and was horrified to discover that all my followers have gone – and I’m not following anyone else. Shouts and screams all over Twitter – well, I imagined them as shouts and screams – confirmed that I am not alone. I went to the page of the King of Twitter, the mighty Ashton Kutcher, and it seemed he too was afflicted with this disease.. this..illness…

 
At that point, I realized that it is not an illness but rather a blessing, that finally, finally we are all equal on Twitter. Ashton, Britney Spears, me, Joe the plumber – even the spammers. We were all equals. None was above the other. In many ways it was truly an utopia.

 
Later I found out this was merely Twitter’s clumsy attempt of fixing a long time bug which allowed users to add themselves to your follower list without your approval (a bug I was aware of, then again, there are many other bugs I’m aware of Twitter is not fixing).

 
After a while this was resolved, Twitter returned to its normal rhythm, and Ashton was king once again.

 
I’ll always remember – even treasure – these precious few minutes (more like hours, actually). The time we were all equal. Perhaps one day this will happen again.

(The image above doesn’t really relate to the article – I just found it amusing).

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article that discusses Twitter and influence. It argues that number of followers isn’t the best measure of Twitter influence. I think he expected me to argue that the article is wrong. However, I fully agree with the article’s premise. Here’s an anecdote: there is a Twitter user I recently stumbled onto who has – if I recall – ~135,000 followers and 0 tweets. Clearly that user is not influential in any way. How he got to this number of followers is a mystery.

 
An additional commonly regarded measure is number of times a user is being retweeted. While I think there is some merit to this idea, I think it fails too. There are quite a lot of users – I can name 5 off the top of my head – who have an auto-tweet mechanism that just tweets quotes and/or facts and/or news all day long. Some are bots – there isn’t even a real user behind them. Personally, I find them somewhat annoying, but manage by mainly ignoring them – though a few friends of mine detest those passionately and argue that these are what will bring Twitter’s downfall. I do have a problem with the quotes being repetitive and cliche, as well as the facts being erroneous and misleading, but that’s a different matter.

 
My point is, these users get retweeted lot. This is unsurprising: corny, cliche quotes would be retweeted since they appeal to the lowest common denominator, particularly if they are repeated countless times. It’s like popular commercials: the jingle sticks in your head no matter what, simply because you hear it all. the. time.

 
Another aspect I haven’t read about and yet would consider relevant is the number of lists one appears in. This appears to be somewhat correlated with influence. However, the more followers and/or the more active a user is, the more lists a user tends to appear in. I wouldn’t say that the more lists a user appears in, the more influential he or she is. However, I would say that a user that is not listed a lot is probably not influential.

 
Yet another aspect is interaction: how much a user interacts with fellow users. Why is this relevant? Because interaction creates relationships, relationships result in paying attention to what one says, and that is influence.

 
Ok, now that we’ve seen this is problematic, how would I measure influence on Twitter? As the article argues, it’s not easy.

 
If I had to devise my own algorithm, and a few months ago I actually considered doing just that, I would take several factors into account. The following are not sorted in order of importance:

1. Number of followers.
    
2. Number of followees.
    
3. Number of tweets.
    
4. Number of lists the user is included in.
    
5. Number of retweets.
    
6. Number of interactions a user has with other users (responses) – both the number of users he/she interacts with and the actual number of interactions (i.e. 100 responses to many different users vs. 100 responses to a single user).
    
7. The characteristics of those who retweet the user’s tweets (i.e. their number of followers, followees, lists, tweets, and retweets).
    
8. The characteristics of those who interact with the user.
    
9. A measure that will indicate whether a user is real person or not. If a user tweet 24 hours a day, in set intervals, and never interacts in any meaningful way (i.e. it may say “thank you for the RTs” in a mechanical manner) it’s not a real person, period. I would remove those from the list completely.

What will this show me? I believe it will – generally – demonstrate who is an influential presence in Twitter. Of course, some people are exempt from this. Conan O’Brien doesn’t need to respond to anyone to be influential. But he’s influential outside of Twitter and this influence carries into Twitter.

 
Why is Twitter influence important? The article stated that companies are paying users with many followers to tweet. This is true to a degree. Companies such as SponsoredTweets and ad.ly (I believe) do factor influence measures into the decision whether to pay a user to tweet. It’s not just number of followers.

 
I don’t intend to do a full survey of Twitter influence tools, but here are three I’ve used.

 
Twitter Grader used to do an adequate job in my opinion, but it was changed so much its results are completely meaningless nowadays. I stopped paying serious attention to it a long time ago, as it is so fundamentally flawed.

 
For example, if you look for major influencers in the state of New Jersey, the #1 – consistently – on the list is a bot (it RTs useful pieces of information – but a bot, nonetheless. Until I see it interact with anyone I won’t believe otherwise). Clearly it assigns excessive importance to retweeting. Also, strangely it includes users that have tweeted a ridiculously low number of tweets and don’t have a lot of followers either (i.e. one user tweeted a total of 172 tweets – seriously, that user is a major influencer? I’m not buying that). Twitter grader also doesn’t explain how it works – it feels like a random generator of numbers. There are more issues but I’ll stop here.

 
Twitterholic (which seems to be in the process of changing its name to Twitaholic) simply shows the number of followers, followees and tweets for a specific area. That, as stated, is not an accurate measure, but it is far superior to the Twitter grader whose results are meaningless. Even this limited number of characteristics says a lot about the user.

 
Klout, I believe, does the best job. What I like about this tool is that it takes a lot of the above factors into consideration and even explains its reasoning why a user is influential or not, and classifies it into one of several categories. It’s really the only tool that does an adequate job in my opinion.

 
And there are many more. Many more. More seem to appear every day.

 
Any thoughts?

 
I keep wavering back and forth whether to publish this post. This was originally written in November 2009 – half a year ago – and I have hesitated whether to publish it since then (and like I said, I’m still not sure I should’ve). But it’s almost 4am and usually my judgment is a bit clouded at these hours… and I can always remove it later (if you think I should: please comment below? I won’t be offended).

 
Most people who know me realize I have an unconventional sense of humor – though I usually tone it down depending on circumstances. I’d like to think most people “get” my sense of humor, but not everyone do.

 
The following events took place when I was trying to work and do something very hard and very important and just felt I couldn’t concentrate. Sometimes in similar situations, I need something sweet… badly. That day, there was nothing at home, and I felt I would go crazy unless I get something. I felt I need cupcakes.

 
So I let loose… didn’t tone myself down at all.

 
You may ask why am I posting this in my blog? Good question. This, in my opinion, is the perfect example of Twitter for people who don’t use it (in a non-business context). It demonstrates.. the appeal.. of this medium: the fact you can have group chats in real time and people can jump in and out of conversations without you knowing them beforehand. You couldn’t do this in Facebook or Google. Only a real time social media network would enable you to do something similar. Even a chat room wouldn’t enable that, as the number and diversity of people listening would be far more limited.

 
Interestingly, I lost some followers during these events, but I gained many more. This later encouraged me to do much much more of these on Twitter. Yet I haven’t published any of these (mis)adventures on this blog. Note that people kept sending me pictures of cupcakes for months after these events.

 
Hopefully my readers will think it’s both amusing and relevant.

 
..and like I said, I reserve the right to remove it..

 
Thus started the cupcake saga. Here’s a summary of the twitter messages that took place on that day. It started like this

 
(each line is a tweet)

 
me: Anyone has cupcakes they can send me? I really need some #cupcakes #goodpeople #please

lefinley: in the oven now…..address please? 😉

me to lefinley: #chocolatechipcookies will do too. How soon can you make it??? This is an emergency

me to lefinley: you aren’t serious, right? :((((((

lefinley: sorry – can’t get 2 NJ in time….plan ur emergencies in the future please! 😉

me: Where do I find cupcakes in Jersey City on a Saturday? The place is desolate on the weekend. ARGHH!!! Help!

ColleenBurns: found it on @yelp they are open till 6 “Made with Love Bakery”

Me to ColleenBurns: RT found it on @yelp they are open till 6 “Made with Love Bakery” -> probably closed and far from my place, but if I start

Me to ColleenBurns: RT found it on @yelp they are open till 6 “Made with Love Bakery” -> running like a madman, I may make it. I need cupcakes.

Me to ColleenBurns: RT found it on @yelp they are open till 6 “Made with Love Bakery” -> Oh, and forgot to say: THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me to lefinley, heykim: Thanks for trying to help, much appreciated!

Georgia_Teacher: Why in the world are you in Jersey City on a Saturday looking for donuts?

Me to Georgia_Teacher: Not donuts. Cupcakes. Donuts would be like giving Tylenol to a terminal patient. I need cupcakes.

Me: If I don’t get cupcakes soon,something terrible will happen, not just to me, but to everyone in the area, if I don’t get cupcakes soon.

Me: I suspect I’ll implode and start sucking everything around me, kind of like a mini-black hole. But that’s just an unproven theory

 
[noticing people are unfollowing me]

 
Me: Nice to see my cupcakes threats are make people unfollow me. This is not an idle threat. Bad stuff will happen. I need cupcakes!

Me: Even my English is breaking down as apparent in my last few tweets. Ok, that’s it. I’m going outside

lefinley: no problem – good luck on your search = YELP rocks!

Me to lefinley: As things should. I’m sure some disaster movies have started with a guy desperately needing cupcakes.

Me: Ok, got the address of a cupcake place. Leaving now. If this works I’ll tweet a picture. If this doesn’t, you’ll hear about this

Me: “Man mysteriously implodes, police are investigating. Looks like a cupcake deficiency caused this natural disaster”

 
[Walking for an hour randomly]

 
Me (through cellphone): I must be miles from home. Found a Dunkin Donuts place. No cupcakes. Danger now spans NYC as well.

 
[Walking for 2 hours, bypassing my house by at least 25 minutes, half delirious, eventually I got home with some loot]

 
Me: So here’s what happened (BTW, I think this episode cost me quite a lot of followers. Have mercy people, I was in distress)

Me: I walked for miles and miles and got completely lost (no shoprite). Every place I asked, no cupcakes. I could tell people were afraid of me.

Me: Eventually I got to a shop. By then it was really bad. I asked for cupcakes but all that came out was grunts. I must’ve appeared deranged

Me: I tried to say “I have a Ph.D., I won prestigious awards, I used to work for Goldman Sachs”. But nothing coherent came out of my mouth

Me: Eventually I pointed out at the hostess cupcakes and paid for them. I knew by then this would not be sufficient to prevent the upcoming doom

Me: The poor people of NJ and NY didn’t realize what will happen unless I eat quality cupcakes.

Me: So I got hostess cupcakes, 16 brownie bites, ice cream, marshmallows and an Oreo cake.

Me: I hope this will save us. May god have mercy on our souls.

 

Aftermath

 
me: I’ve eaten them, feel much better now.

carribean_skye: were you looking scary too?

Me to caribbean_skye: I think I looked a little bit like when Bruce Banner starts the transformation to the Hulk

Me: Well, I’m back to work. I think the disaster has been averted thanks to my heroic efforts. Unsung heroes, now I understand the meaning.

Twitter DM Longer than 140 characters

The following is a list of tips, tricks and tidbits of information that can be useful to any user. I think Twitter should have a central resource explaining at least some of these, because not being aware of some can definitely affect user experience (i.e. #8)

 

1. Changing user names: I’ve known several users who wanted to change their user names so that no one could find them. Well, unfortunately, Twitter makes it quite easy to track a user even if they do change their user name.
   
    
   1. If you’ve ever corresponded with the user, by clicking on the “in reply to” you’ll get to the actual message regardless of the user’s new name.
      

   2. If you’ve ever listed the user – and this could be a private (invisible) list as well – the user would still appear in the list regardless of his new name.

    

2. Changing user names #2: the only true way to “start a new life” on Twitter is by opening a new account. Though if the person still “hangs out” with the same crowd he did before, he will be found… there’s no Twitter witness protection program ;-).
   
    

3. Getting out of lists: if someone places a user in a list and he does not wish to be listed, all he needs to do is block the listing user and he’ll be removed from all public/private lists.
   (note that as I mentioned in #1, this is one partial way to escape detection when changing a user name).
   
    
   A while ago one of the eccentric users who took it on themselves to police user activities told me that “I’m being watched from now on” (95% of his tweets to other users were “You’re being watched”. Immediately after he sent it to me, he also sent this to Arnold Schwarzenegger – I said he was eccentric, right?). I chuckled to myself and blocked him. Good luck with that, buddy – let’s see you track all of those without using private lists.
   
    

4. DM mechanism: Unlike what Twitter states, the DM mechanism is not limited to 140 characters. Whether it’s a bug or a feature, I don’t know. As far as I heard, using an external application can enable you to send much longer DMs, though most applications – and the web interface – limit you to 140 characters. This is easily demonstrated by a screenshot of a DM I received some time ago (which appears at the top of this post).
   
    

5. Finding out whether you’ve been blocked: How do you find out whether a user has blocked you without trying to follow them again? Easily: you go to their profile page and see whether you can list them. If you can’t, you’ve been blocked. In addition, you can actually do this en-masse by going to a list, or a user’s followers list, and see whether there are any users you cannot list. All these have blocked you.
   
    

6. Public messages: I’m sure you know that you only see responses to a user if you follow both sides: so if user @a talks to user @b, you’ll see their individual responses if you follow both users a and b. However, one way to make a response public is by adding a dot . before the response, i.e. .@a message. Of course, when you think about it, this really changes the response to a standard tweet, which is of course public, yet this still is a commonly used mechanism for making responses public and usually the dot is used as well.
   
    

7. Number of stored tweets: many users are not aware of this, but the profile page only shows the last 3,000 tweets. If a user wants to be able to view all his tweets, he should use a service like Backupmy which is free and stores all the tweets that have been sent.
   
   Interestingly, it seems Twitter does in fact store all tweets. This is evident by clicking on ‘in response to’ of really old tweets as well as by the favorites section – which often include tweets that have long vanished from one’s profile. I find this a weird design choice on Twitter’s end.
   
    

8. Vanishing DMs: I’m not sure whether this was always the case or was only changed a few months ago: DMs vanish if one of the participants in the correspondence deletes them. This is a very bad design choice, since it is possible to delete a DM before its recipient has seen it! Also, if Twitter has made this choice, why not be consistent and do the same for responses?
   
    

9. Vanishing DMs #2: On the other hand, if a user terminates his account, his DMs are still available.
   
    

10. Number of followers/followees/lists bug: this is a serious bug that has been present for at least several months, and I’m sure almost every user has encountered it. Specifically, the number of followers and/or followees and/or lists one appears in fluctuates: A refresh of the screen changes it, and another refresh may change it back. Usually the difference is by no more than 15, but I’ve seen one user whose follower numbers fluctuated by a 100 (exactly!). Weird bug, and I don’t understand why it is still present after so long since it clearly affects user experience.

     
    I’m sure there are many more of the above I omitted – if you have some suggestions, please let me know!

     

I like Facebook's Like Button

It seems many people have something to say about Facebook’s new addition, the universal “like” button. Some people have voiced concerns about privacy. Others just try to figure how to add it to their sites: I added the button with a simple WordPress plugin, though to be honest, I’d like to add a “like box” to my blog – what used to be a part of the Facebook fan page mechanism. Still working on that.

 
Personally I think this was a brilliant move on Facebook’s end. Not only they will dramatically increase their penetration to countless internet sites that had no relationship with them, but they also give advertisers the ability to target these “likes” – at least, I assume they do, I still personally haven’t tried to do that (if I am mistaken, someone please correct me…). All in all, ingenious move.

 
On a side note, I have to say I always resented the Facebook fan page concept. Not the actual mechanism, but the idea of ‘fans’. Being a fan is a pretty strong term in my opinion, so I deliberately tried to avoid using it as much as I could. Now that they changed it to “Like”, I feel much more comfortable with it. Yes, this is only semantics – but it when you think about it, this means quite a lot. I think far more people would be likely to say they “like” me than saying they are my “fans”. Don’t you agree? I wonder why it took Facebook so long to figure this out, I remember discussing this with a friend back in 2007 or 2008.

 
p.s. Twitter, why can’t you be more like Facebook? Instead of imposing silly rules and limitations (such as Twitter Jail) or some “innovative” concepts such as the Retweet button, come up with some useful stuff? Please?