Someone is in my Twitter!!
I have an issue where I noticed two Tweets in my Twitter account that weren’t made by me, here they are:
http://twitter.com/johnt/statuses/24515341
“Phillip Pearlman, Sam Zell, Valleywag, and me /A VC/ - Phillip Pearlman is a hedge fund manager, stock … http://tinyurl.com/2a985z”
http://twitter.com/johnt/statuses/25236971
“Fluorescent Adolescent /A VC/ - Here’s a great track from the new Arctic Monkeys record. It’s called … http://tinyurl.com/22jt4s”
Now how did someone slip into my stream?
Auto replies
While I’m on the topic of Twitter I thought I’d mention the auto-reply feature I just noticed.
If I want to Tweet to someone in particular, but still display it in the public stream, the norm is to use the “@” symbol. When you do this, the “@” symbol is recognised by Twitter and your post (Tweet) will auto-display a reply link.
eg. I made this Tweet about my identity issue with Twitter, then I made another Tweet, then Elsua used the “@” symbol, intending to reply to my first Tweet (I can tell he is replying to my first Tweet from the content in his Tweet).
Now if you look at his Tweet, it auto-displays a reply link “in reply to johnt”…but this links to my second Tweet, not my first Tweet.
Here is his Tweet:
“elsua @johnt: Are you serious with that claim? Are you saying that you Twitter account has been hacked! Wooohooo! I didn’t expect it’d be so soon! about 1 hour ago from web in reply to johnt”
So this auto-reply displayed link isn’t that effective as it is links by default to the last Tweet of the user you are replying to even though you may really be replying to their 8th last Tweet.
Even worse, what if you are doing a shout-out to a friend, that is you are not replying, but initiating a Tweet using the “@” symbol. Your Tweet will auto list a link to the last Tweet of the person you are Tweeting to. That person’s last Tweet will 99% be totally unrelated to your Tweet…imagine their last Tweet was to someone else using the “@” symbol, this would get confusing.
Groups
Wouldn’t it be great if Twitter had groups, that is, instead of following a person eg. twitter/johnt, you could follow a group eg. twitter/groupA. All a group would do is re-publish all the user Tweets into the group Twitter as well. So if you belonged to 5 groups, your Tweets would show up in 7 places (5 groups, your user space, and the public space).
This would make it more managable to follow groups of people by SMS or IM, eg. leave groupA eg. follow groupB, etc…
Or perhaps a multi-authored account like MACWORLD.
Check out 30 boxes for their group hack…make a view by adding people, see here. If this had a feed I could make lots of these and subscribe to different groups of people by RSS, and then I could also get this on IM or SMS or email via Rasasa, ZapTXT, or Blastfeed…or even email via Emailtwitter.com…also see Anothr for IM.
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