Ady's Burogu

I'm gonna talk about Twitter and social networks in general over here.

As some of you may know, I have been fairly active on social networks such a Facebook, Twitter, mixi, etc. I agree these are a major time wasters and writing this post itself is utter stupidity. But, something happened in the last two days which I think should be written down. That's the only way I'm gonna get over it.

On Twitter, I follow some very awesome people. Though I have never met most of them, some of them do regularly engage in fairly interesting debates. In spite of following so many amazing people, I do miss friends of Twitter. Most of my friends are still busy playing FarmVille on Facebook. So I do regularly run a search on my gmail address book to check if anyone else has jumped on the bandwagon. Last week I found a Japanese colleague! His Keitai (Mobile) address somehow landed up in my gmail address book! As he had just started tweeting a few days ago, I immediately followed him and said hello. He doesn't follow anyone and probably has on idea what an @ reply is. So yesterday I told him about the discovery and he seemed to be pretty shocked about it. He said things like 個人情報がばれちゃいましたね (My private information has leaked).

Second incident.

I follow this bot @unfollowr. It does simply one thing, sends you a DM when someone unfollows you. Generally consists of other spam bots whose accounts get deleted and some people who are annoyed by my tweets ^^;. This time it was a friend (at least i thought of her as a friend!). I had noticed that she had been consistently ignoring my replies for a month or so. So I left a blunt final reply saying a little more than 'thank you'. Again, she was shocked that I even noticed her unfollowing me. A while ago I received a looooooong mail explaining the whole deal about why she unfollowed me. I'm not complaining about that part. Things happen. People change. Understandable.

My problem is that the culprit here is Twitter (Japan).

Both these people tweet solely from their Keitais (Mobile phones) and have no idea what kinda stuff the Twitter API is capable of. The part where Twitter breaks the rules of social networking in Japan is the Address Book Search feature. To the best of my knowledge, none of the major social networking sites have this kind of feature. Recently some have started 'suggesting' friends, but address book search is just a no no! I bet the Keitai interface of twitter (twtr.jp) doesn't even have this feature. Can someone confirm this? I only have an iPhone ^^;
Even facebook has a similar problem. Out there its worse! Pictures are involved. And no one has a clue of things like Privacy Settings!

Thanks to this, I just lost the trust of two people I thought were my friends. In my book of rules, if you cant accept me on a silly social network, how the hell can you be a friend in real life!? Screw you!

As @mona says on her blog, I don’t care who you are, what you do, who you know, or where you come from. Here – the Internet – we are all the same: pixels

I know this is a stupid post. Eff you twitter. Eff you Facebook. Long live email!

Ady

Posted via email from Ady’s μBurogu