Twitter sparks London riots – #yeahright

Monday, August 8th, 2011

If you believe newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail, the rioting in London over the weekend was orchestrated and organised on Twitter, with the Mail, for example, claiming the “violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times”.

Really? So what sparked the riots of three decades ago? A ZX Spectrum and a fleet of Raleigh Grifters?

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Just how popular is Google+?

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

We keep getting told that Google+ is Facebook’s biggest threat, that it’s on the rise faster than a 1990s house price and the only way is up. We’re told it already has 10 million profiles – or is it 20 million?

But is Google+ really catching on? I mean really, as in outside this little tech industry bubble we love to confine ourselves to? (more…)

Google+: big companies can cause big problems

Monday, July 25th, 2011

In its first three weeks of availability, Google+ reportedly attracted 20 million users. That’s a pretty impressive launch – especially since it’s been accompanied by what can only be described as a negative marketing campaign. Even as millions of users have poured onto the service, Google has insisted on calling it a “limited field trial”. At this rate, by the time they officially make it available to the public, everyone will already be on it.

Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss. (more…)

Berners-Lee: Stop foaming at the mouth, Twitter

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the web, but that doesn’t mean he loves everything that’s on it — and that includes Twitter and Facebook.

Sir Tim has a well-documented aversion to social networking, previously describing the walled gardens of Facebook and LinkedIn as one of the threats to the web. But those who prefer the more open-natured Twitter over Facebook shouldn’t feel favoured by the web-creator’s sporadic tweets — he doesn’t have kind words for the nature of updates being shared.

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Thousands fall victim to Facebook profile scam

Monday, November 29th, 2010

I have to admit that I really don’t care who has looked at my Facebook profile. If I didn’t want people to see it I would nuke my Facebook account. If anyone who does take a look is so impressed by my boyish good looks and the eloquent charm of my update postings, then they can request to become my friend and I can merrily ignore them.

There are, in all honesty, many other things which take priority when it comes to worrying Mr Winder: when will the central-heating boiler start working again, how much snow is going to fall today and what will my nose look like by the end of the week after surgeons have finished operating on my face, for example. Yet, for tens of thousands of Facebook users the question has obviously been weighing heavy on their minds. At least that is the only explanation I can think of to explain why a rogue Facebook app is running riot right now.

“OMG, OMG, OMG! Now you can see who viewed your Facebook profile” the scam message doing the rounds suggests, and a click on the link allows you to download an app to reveal all.

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What The Social Network gets wrong

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Is Facebook the work of a loner, a nearly-autistic coding genius, an anti-social jerk? That’s the premise of Hollywood’s take on the founding of the world’s largest social network.

I saw The Social Network last week, as our good friends at Den of Geek had a spare ticket to an advanced screening. Thanks to a bizarre embargo, I’m not allowed to review the film yet, despite many takes already hitting the web (but when it does come out next week, go see it; it’s fascinating and very funny).

While the film has certainly made its producers very happy by winning top spot at the US box office over the weekend, and being described as the best picture of the year so far by unencumbered reviewers on the other side of the Atlantic, many tech pundits are crying foul over the negative portrayal of founder Mark Zuckerberg.

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Tweeted a stupid update? Time for a name change

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Kids today post so much embarrassing personal content online that one day they’re going to have to change their names to escape the mess. That’s what Google’s Eric Schmidt believes, anyway.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t quote Schmidt directly, but reports that: “He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

Let’s assume he is indeed serious. Most Facebookers and Twitterers have posted impetuous comments only to later delete them in embarrassment, or lived to regret their friends tagging them in a goofy, drunken photo, so it’s no wonder years down the line it may seem time to hit reset.

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Twitter oven lets you have your cake and tweet it

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Twitter gets an awful lot of criticism as being a useless waste of time, but a friend just tweeted about something that I reckon is the most brilliant use of the technology ever: a tweeting oven called BakerTweet. Now confession first: this isn’t new. In fact, the BakerTweet was installed last year. But this is the first I’ve heard of it and it reminded me just how fantastic technology can be.

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Twitter goes down (again) but will it soon be counted out for good?

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Earlier today (Tuesday 11th August) Twitter went down, albeit briefly for around half an hour, with the official status blog reporting first “a site outage” but then changing tone later to say it was busy analysing traffic data to “determine the nature of this attack”.

Of course, while the Twitter servers may well have been up and running in under an hour of going down, the same cannot be said of third party applications which took considerably longer to recover it would seem. Not, it has to be said, as bad as last week following the 15 fat Russians in a revolving door DDoS attack which saw the Twitter service impacted for days and some third party apps struggling to get back up to speed for days after that. (more…)

A bad week for social networking

Friday, August 7th, 2009

All in all it has been a bad week for social networking. It started on Monday with the leader of the Roman Catholics in the UK, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, saying that social networking sites undermined community life and would lead to teen suicides.

His concern was that teens were treating friendships as a commodity to be traded – the fact that more people might follow someone you know on Twitter than follow you might be seen as a reason for suicide. One might have thought with the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to sex, they might prefer social networking liaisons to real ones – but we better not go there. (more…)