Lee’s Daily Blog

This post is for Sunday 14th June 2009

I learnt this afternoon that you need to be careful what you ask on Twitter.

I’m currently looking for an online backup service. Plugging in my external hard drive just seems too much effort and I don’t do it nearly often enough. I’m hoping by automating an online backup, I don’t need to worry about it quite as much.

I decided to ask for suggestions on twitter, hoping a few of my followers may come up with something. I got a couple of responses back, but also a handful of spam messages.

I first got an @leesto reply from the @cloudberryman account mentioning their service. Now at this stage, this promotion worked reasonably well. It got me to look at their website and I’d now heard about their service for the first time. However, I then got spammed by a further 2 accounts – @AmazonS3S3 and @hashwindows , promoting the same site. To make things worse, upon clarifying something to one of my followers, I got 2 more spam messages from those accounts.

What did this result in? Apart from spamming me and causing me to write this blog post about it, it has also cause me to compeltely discount their service I may possibly have gone with. I don’t like spammers.

I’ve been using Twitter more and more recently and apart from my desktop client, the main place I use twitter is on my iPod touch. I’ve gone through a few iPhone apps including Twinkle, the free version of Twitterific and most recently Tweetie.

So far, it is the best twitter app I’ve used – largely because it has all the functionality I need there, but whilst still keeping everything simple.

The main list of all the received twitter updates can take one of two formats. Either a classic list, or an iChat style list:

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This post is for Monday 2nd February 2009

So I’m writing this quite a bit after everyone else is thinking something similar. However, in the last couple of weeks I’ve finally come round to the thought that Twitter is finally starting to head mainstream.

Why did it happen? I think it was celebrity involvement – at least here in the UK. Obama I think helped in the States, Britney I don’t think was any use at all, but here in the UK I think we can thank Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross.

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