Vicarious Living Gets Shut Down (Twitter attack)

[Robert Sharp]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/06/twitter.attack/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Sadness. I don't actually visit or use Twitter in any way, but I know lots of people do.

[RyanMichael]

I couldn't tweet for 90 minutes today. It was scary and disorienting. I had to actually post on Facebook just to prevent myself from losing it altogether.

[Miramon]

Today was the first day in a while that I happened to want to look at twitter at all. It's mostly vapid and pointless, even from people like analysts who aren't just wasting time talking about their current sensory impressions or replying to other people's qualia.

[Cubit]

Today was the first day in a while that I happened to want to look at twitter at all. It's mostly vapid and pointless, even from people like analysts who aren't just wasting time talking about their current sensory impressions or replying to other people's qualia.

Eh, to each his own. I use twitter and find it a valuable source of information as well as a way to communicate with friends. I guess it depends on who you follow.

[Tim James]

I couldn't tweet for 90 minutes today. It was scary and disorienting. I had to actually post on Facebook just to prevent myself from losing it altogether.Couldn't you have used your AIM away message, or maybe updated your .plan file?

[Miramon]

Couldn't you have used your AIM away message, or maybe updated your .plan file?

Do people still use finger?

[Morkilus]

Millions of Morons Contribute to Twitter Attack (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/technology/internet/07twitter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss)

Mr. Woodcock said the disruptions did not appear to have been caused by a botnet, or network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers.

Rather, he said, at about 10:30 a.m. E.S.T., millions of people worldwide received spam e-mail messages containing links to Twitter and other sites. When recipients clicked on the links, those sites were overwhelmed with requests to access their servers. “It’s a vast increase in traffic that creates the denial of service,” he said.

[Alan Au]

So basically, Twitter got Slashdotted?

- Alan

[Erlend Grefsrud]

You got mail.

[Robert Sharp]

Eh, to each his own. I use twitter and find it a valuable source of information as well as a way to communicate with friends. I guess it depends on who you follow.

Really? Could you explain how? Most of the twitters I've seen were describing the really inane details of a person's day. Are you saying you get news a bit quicker, and then can go read the actual article about it, and things like that?

I mean check out this article quote:

But for people like Cimino, who said she "felt naked" without access to Twitter, the attacks were a serious reality check -- a chance to evaluate just how dependent they'd become.

"You know how you pat your pockets for your cell phone and your keys? Well it's that same kind of phantom [limb] with Twitter," she said. "It's like, 'I can't update! I can't update!' It's just one of those bugs that gets in you."

She added: "I was pretty upset, actually. It feels like a lifeline for me ... Pretty much everyone knows almost every detail of my life by what I'm doing on Twitter."

Is knowing every detail about some nobody's life really that important? Of course, I suppose people use it in different ways. I don't know, since I don't follow twitter. So set me straight (no sarcasm intended).

[Jose Liz]

The Twitter outage yesterday and the Twitter API outage today have been devastating.

[RyanMichael]

Really? Could you explain how? Most of the twitters I've seen were describing the really inane details of a person's day. Are you saying you get news a bit quicker, and then can go read the actual article about it, and things like that?

Is knowing every detail about some nobody's life really that important? Of course, I suppose people use it in different ways. I don't know, since I don't follow twitter. So set me straight (no sarcasm intended).

I'm not going to try and describe the myriad uses of twitter, I can only talk about how I use it.

The first thing to get past is that it's not 1-way. It's not all "I'm eating pancakes NOM NOM NOM" or "My car won't start, FML!" You have conversations, you make contact. If you're doing it right, every day you're engaging people and seeing what interests them, too.

I've been on the service about 7 months now and to say it's been amazing would be an understatement. The dozens of the people I've met have been really cool, crossing a wide range of occupations and interests. The common unifying factor pretty much comes down to making personal and business connections and having fun.

I've raised my personal brand awareness, which is one of those sentences that sounds really stupid when you say it. But it boils down to the fact twitter has put me in touch with people who wouldn't have heard about me or my business, people I wouldn't have had any reason I'd think to approach or be able to approach. And thanks to it we're talking, having beers and becoming resources for each other.

I've also made a ton of new friends, which makes the business perks icing on the cake. The tweetups I've been to have always been fun, and I've found some great new restaurants and bars I wouldn't have stumbled across either.

Twitter isn't just what you're doing, but what you're thinking, and it's great to be able to keep up with the thoughts, activities, and interests of your friends in a way that you couldn't do necessarily do catching up with them once every few weeks when your schedules align.

It's not for everyone. There gets to be a time committment if you're following a few hundred people and trying to keep up and converse with them. But as a tool to meet fun people, network, and do business, it's now indispensible for me.

[EvilIdler]

VM alert!

[ElGuapo]

Jesus it sounds like a huge self-invasion of privacy to me. Why would you participatenon that? Don't you value your privacy? Don't they value theirs?

Welcome to the grid, I suppose. Who knew everyone would be their own reality show star?

[Tankero]

Jesus it sounds like a huge self-invasion of privacy to me. Why would you participatenon that? Don't you value your privacy? Don't they value theirs?

Welcome to the grid, I suppose. Who knew everyone would be their own reality show star?

Obviously, this is the work of the NSA. Now we're our own surveillance!


Well, you guys are your own, more precisely. I never got into twitter, it seemed dumb to me.

[The Bird Flu]

Twitter, Myspace, Facebook... they all seem silly to me. I'm 31 so I guess it's because I'm old. I love usenet and forums (even though I don't post much) because they spark discussion. Social networks always remind me of this picture.

http://www.forumammo.com/cpg/albums/Upload/Attention/Attention-Whore_Beach.jpg (http://www.forumammo.com/cpg/albums/Upload/Attention/Attention-Whore_Beach.jpg)

[barstein]

For me, Twitter quickly devolved/evolved into a platform for 144-character poems and one-liner jokes, and the only tweets I actually pay any attention to now are in a similar vein (or at least, those that are just well-written or contextualized cleverly, which so far makes up a pretty small group). For that, I've come to really like it and this was a surprising revelation considering my general stance on social networking.

[Enidigm]

It's definitely an age thing, although your region does have a lot to do with it as well - less urban areas are further behind the curve. In high school we had pagers, and those were cool. It's a bit disorienting reading comments from dating threads here on Qt3 saying not having a Facebook page = no date. Same planet, different worlds.

I guess i could wax poetic and make lots of hand-waving generalizations about the "American Idol" culture or something, but that would be somewhat disingenuous because i don't completely believe that, although there is a bit of truth to it too. But pretty much it's basic human nature, like passing pointless gossipy notes in class (Twitter), showing how great you are (Facebook), taking pics of how great you are (Webcams, Flickr, ect) and all the social networking that goes along with that.

Well, basic human nature, hyper-accelerated by the internet with instantaneous feedback into a fevered pitch, anyway.

[RyanMichael]

I don't think it's an age thing at all. In fact, most of the people I've met through twitter would fall into the 30-45 age range.

But this could be an experience unique to the area I'm in, and also the networks that I've stumbled into. There might be pockets of 18 year olds on twitter in this area that I just don't run across.

[unbongwah]

http://site.despair.com/images/dw/m/socialmedia.jpg (http://www.despair.com/somevedi.html)

[Tim James]

Now that is a quality Venn diagram, folks. I'd like to see IRC off floating around somewhere for proper nerd historical context, though.

I had never heard of tweetstalk either. Couldn't they have used LiveJournal instead? (Note that I may be way off here.)

[RyanMichael]

That shirt is both awesome and accurate.