Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody.
I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter — Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy.
His Tweets are well written, often funny, and almost universally informative. If you’re interested in politics at all, you should start following him immediately. When people protest that they don’t see the value in Twitter, Knoller should be part of the explanation of why they’re wrong.
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill on why she tweets:
Second, as his bar graph showed, I tweet an average of 4 to 5 times a day. This has become a welcome discipline for me in Washington. As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected. After all, I’m in Washington to work for them and this process reminds me of it several times a day.
The anti-Twitter backlash is stupid, but at least it has given people who enjoy or find value in Twitter a good reason to write smart things about why it’s stupid.
Alex Payne on online technical debate:
In practice, the conversations that are most widely heard in the tech community are full of inaccuracies, manufactured drama, ignorance, and unbridled opinion. In discussing these Internet-spanning debates with non-technical friends, comparisons to Hollywood tabloids come first to mind. It’s a time sink for an industry that should be a shining example of how to use the newest of media for constructive debate.
Tim Bray weighs in citing Sturgeon’s Law — 90% of everything is crap, which works both ways. Yeah, most everything is crap, but a bigger pie leads to more crap, but more non-crap too. A rising tide lifts all boats.
The “Dalai Lama” (aka @ohhdl) on Twitter was a fake. The account has been suspended.
A few links from the past few days.
I linked to Tim Bray’s argument that Twitter is not a safe place to keep your words. Here’s the other side: James Governor says Twitter is the new London. I find myself agreeing with both arguments.
Tim Bray asks whether publishing on Twitter is a good long term strategy. The network effect of writing on Twitter is incredibly powerful, you toss your words out there for a bunch of people to read, and the responses they provide are incredibly valuable. I love being involved in a running conversation with a bunch of interesting people all day every day. At the same time, my Twitter posts would in some way constitute a journal of what I’m up to on a day to day basis. I’d sure like to feel confident that they’re not going anywhere. I’m not terribly concerned about it right now, but it bears watching.
Now it can be told (apparently). The Twitter abuse that I posted about yesterday resulted from a Twitter employee giving their password to a third party service. Someone then used that password to access Twitter with administrative rights and amuse themselves.
Part of the problem here is that the credentials required to access your account through the API are the same as those required to access the site through the Web interface. But the other lesson here for developers is that you should really split up the administrative features of your application and the end user features into separate accounts. They probably shouldn’t even use the same interface. That may be more painful for users but it eliminates a lot of risks. And of course employees should know better than to hand out their passwords to random Web sites.
Update: Turns out the password in question was guessed, not phished. Either way, it’s an argument for separating the administrative functions from the standard user interface.
Looks like the Twitter phishing attacks over the weekend led to some hilarious results.
There’s a phishing scheme being run against Twitter users right now. It looks like the objective is the collection of more Twitter passwords, but I’d expect that there is some other fraudulent angle as well that is perhaps yet to be revealed. In any case, avoid clicking on links in direct messages and if you’ve given your password to a third party service, you may want to change it.
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