The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

This is a lit­tle warn­ing from your friendly, neigh­bour hippy.

Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broad­cast­ing your loca­tion with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talk­ing about?

If you answered “yes” to any of those ques­tions, espe­cially that last one, you really need to pay atten­tion to this.

Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You prob­a­bly know this already. It means it can work out your loca­tion using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower infor­ma­tion to a rea­son­ably accu­rate degree. That fea­ture is built right into the core archi­tec­ture of your iPhone.

Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion at the core, means appli­ca­tions like many iPhone Twit­ter clients, can mag­i­cally grab your exact loca­tion (expressed in lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude) and attach it to your tweets and Twit­ter account.

If you look at people’s Twit­ter pro­files, occa­sion­ally you will see two sets of num­bers where their city would nor­mally be…if you cut and paste those num­bers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.

Per­haps there are times when you want to broad­cast your loca­tion, for exam­ple, you are vis­it­ing a famous land­mark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Sat­ur­day night and you want your friends to eas­ily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.

But what if you are at home, mer­rily tweet­ing away about your two-week hol­i­day abroad that starts tomor­row and you’re not aware you’re send­ing out your home address with every mes­sage? Sup­pose you have a photo of your­self on your account, or hun­dreds of them on your linked Face­book page.

What would it take for some enter­pris­ing crim­i­nal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, know­ing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?

Very lit­tle.

Think I’m being para­noid? Think again, because some­thing like this hap­pened recently in Ari­zona. Here, check out this local report.

So what can you do to avoid this hap­pen­ing to you?

Sim­ple, become more aware of loca­tion awareness.

If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other loca­tion aware device, if one exists), go into the set­tings of your pre­ferred Twit­ter client and turn off loca­tion ser­vices. The set­ting is some­place dif­fer­ent in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main set­tings sec­tion from your home screen.

When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broad­cast your loca­tion. And if you are home, or where you work, this should prob­a­bly always be “no”.

You can re-enable this fea­ture if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really rec­om­mend keep­ing it switched off as your default setting.

Also, check your own Twit­ter pro­file, to see what you have listed as your loca­tion. You might dis­cover a lit­tle surprise.

If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Set­tings, then find the lit­tle box for loca­tion and type some­thing suit­ably vague. Mine says: “north Lon­don, UK, Earth”, in case any­one con­fuses it with the Venu­sian version.

There’s one more sim­ple thing you can do to pro­tect your­self, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many spe­cific track-able, real-world details about yourself.

I realise if you are tweet­ing under your own name, and can be found by direc­tory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all pri­vacy minded, nei­ther of those things will be true of you. They are cer­tainly not true of me, but I am extremely pro­tec­tive of my pri­vacy online and off.

If you’re some­one who didn’t realise you’ve been prac­ti­cally attach­ing your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is espe­cially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home con­tents insur­ance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.

I’ve been try­ing to get my head around the steady, con­stant stream of fol­low­ers who come and go like the tides. It seems I’m just about gain­ing and los­ing them in equal num­bers and its all rather random.

I’ve been look­ing at the data com­piled at TweetEffect.Com, which cross-references your tweets with the gains and loses in your fol­low­ers. In look­ing at my data, it seems the same tweets attract and repel at the same time.

Con­fus­ing!

It got me to think­ing about the best ways to instantly attract a fol­low­ing on Twit­ter. I came up with ten ideas that I thought I would share:

1) Be famous already — If you are already famous, you have an estab­lished fan base and an instant fol­low­ing. Of course, if you’re already famous you don’t need my help.

2) Imi­tate a celebrity — This is sur­pris­ingly effec­tive, but can be short lived. Oh and point­less, now that @Valebrity and @CelebsWhoTwitter are mak­ing efforts to ver­ify them. That said, a fake Tina Fey has over 100,000 fol­low­ers, you could just change the account name and sell it on eBay for heaps of cash.

3) Get endorsed by @wossy or @stephenfry — Your Twit­ter name men­tioned or rec­om­mended by either of them, or any other celebrity with a large fol­low­ing will attract scores of new fol­low­ers. Whether or not they remain loyal to you is another question.

4) Take a photo of a com­mer­cial air­liner in the Hud­son River or of one crash­ing near Ams­ter­dam — If fate puts you some­place where some­thing sig­nif­i­cant is hap­pen­ing, doc­u­ment it as best you can. Take pho­tos if you have a cam­er­a­phone and tweet them, tweet about what you see. If it is impor­tant enough and you are there soon enough, every­one will want to see what you cap­ture next.

5) Fol­low every­one and hope a large per­cent­age fol­low u back — This is the equiv­a­lent of throw­ing as much shit as you can at a wall and hop­ing some of it sticks. And like shit and des­per­a­tion, this one smells bad too, don’t bother.

6) Swear pro­fusely — Thanks to CurseBird.Com, the more you use bad lan­guage, the higher your rank on that web­site. I like it.

7) Require a res­cue — This one would be good as long as you sur­vive, but if you don’t, its a bit point­less. Hope you’re never in a posi­tion to find out!

8) Offer peo­ple a free lap­top — I don’t know if this works, but I do seem to get fol­lowed by a lot of peo­ple who want to give me a free Mac­Book Air.

9) Offer to tweet your credit cards num­bers if u hit 1,000 fol­low­ers — Guilty! Yes this one’s from me. I’ve still got a long way to go.

10) Be refresh­ingly orig­i­nal & enter­tain­ing — it couldn’t hurt!

Hav­ing a some­what point­lessly devi­ous mind means you occa­sion­ally spot things that are meant to be used one way, but can just as eas­ily be exploited to be used another way.

Every user account on Twit­ter offers you the chance to receive the tweets it gen­er­ates via an RSS feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, click right here.

If you have either your browser or a news­reader app con­fig­ured to deal with RSS feeds, all you need to do is click on the RSS link and its mag­i­cally added to your sub­scrip­tions list.

The link on Twit­ter pro­files is easy to find, its just below the thumb­nail pho­tos of the peo­ple being followed:

Once you’ve added the link to your RSS reader, every time you refresh it, you will receive the tweets from the selected feeds, assum­ing they’ve sent any­thing since the last time you updated.

All that’s fair enough, but what if you wanted to fol­low some­one with­out them know­ing you’re fol­low­ing them. Per­haps an ex-partner, maybe even your cur­rent one or your boss or your best friend or your worst enemy, whoever?

You can use this method to accom­plish just that, stalk­ing with stealth on Twitter.

If you fol­low someone’s tweets via your RSS reader, you won’t appear in their fol­low­ers list. You won’t appear any­where and only you will know you’re receiv­ing them.

Sneaky and cool, eh?

Now, I know there are peo­ple out there who might use this rel­a­tively sim­ple tech­nique for nefar­i­ous pur­poses, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Right?

Hav­ing a lot of free time recently has meant I’ve been able to immerse myself in the Twit­ter­verse. Its an odd place to vir­tu­ally hang out and it reminds me of so many things.

I’ve already com­pared it to try­ing to shout the loud­est in a room full of shouty peo­ple. Com­pet­ing for atten­tion seems to be impos­si­ble, unless you already com­mand atten­tion from peo­ple in the real world.

Celebri­ties seem to thrive the most in the Twit­ter­verse. As they are already cel­e­brated, peo­ple are ready to engage with them and hang on their every word.

Many peo­ple seems to spend an inor­di­nate amount of time try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with celebri­ties, to be noticed by them, receive a reply from them, or bet­ter an endorse­ment of what­ever it is they do on the inter­net. There’s a sort of spe­cial per­sonal val­i­da­tion that can only come from mak­ing some sort of con­tact with a celebrity.

Its not a one-way street, as the celebri­ties also ben­e­fit from the atten­tion they receive. The more fol­low­ers on Twit­ter you have, the more pop­u­lar and wor­thy a celebrity you are and I would expect this sort of thing will be used in future con­tract nego­ti­a­tions for some of them. I can hear their agents now, say­ing with absolute author­ity, that celebrity X has 100,000 plus fol­low­ers on Twit­ter which means there’s an instant, loyal audi­ence for any­thing they do.

Maybe that’s true. But maybe not.

Just because I fol­low a celebrity on Twit­ter, does not mean I will see their film, watch their TV show, buy their album or even visit their blog. The ease with which you can fol­low some­one means you may only have a pass­ing inter­est in what they really do, but you are curi­ous about how they use Twitter.

Some celebri­ties seem to use Twit­ter as a way to feed their own ego and nar­cis­sism. There’s noth­ing wrong with that and to be hon­est, I wouldn’t mind scor­ing myself a lit­tle piece of that kind of Twit­ter action too. It seems seduc­tive and addic­tive, to have a con­stant flow of pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion from strangers who admire you for one rea­son or another.

But Twit­ter doesn’t work like that, if my brief and ever-evolving list of fol­low­ers is any­thing to go by. As a vir­tual Twit­ter nobody, peo­ple choose to fol­low me on the basis of ran­domly encoun­ter­ing one of my tweets, or fish­ing for key words con­tained within them.

I’ve been tweet­ing a bit about my cof­fee con­sump­tion. Its innocu­ous enough, true to my life and its how I start most days, with a freshly made cap­puc­cino. Prob­a­bly 20% of my fol­low­ers have picked up on my cof­fee ref­er­ences and that’s why they are there.

I’ve also made a few ref­er­ences to being a jour­nal­ist in real life, so I have a hand­ful of fol­low­ers inter­ested in the field of news. I don’t tweet much about that part of my life, so they will end up disappointed.

I also tweet about drugs, specif­i­cally my weed intake. I some­times use bad lan­guage and one day I may even make some cock jokes. I know that when I do, I will lose followers.

The more focussed your tweets are on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject, the more loyal your fol­low­ers will be. Per­haps I should split myself into sev­eral vir­tual peo­ple on Twit­ter; the cof­fee­hippy, to tweet about my java intake, the weed­hippy, to tweet about smok­ing spliffs and lastly, the cock­hippy who only makes dick jokes.

I’m just going to keep tweet­ing what­ever I feel like tweet­ing and if I offend some peo­ple, I’ll prob­a­bly end up enthralling oth­ers. Who knows? My net num­ber of fol­low­ers seems to be slightly ever increas­ing and I’m not really pay­ing that much atten­tion to the peo­ple who leave.

I did promise to tweet my credit card num­bers if I ever reach 1000 fol­low­ers, which is quite an incen­tive to fol­low me and put up with my bullshit.

And by bull­shit, of course I mean high-quality, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing bull­shit of 140 char­ac­ters in length.

I’ve spent the last week hang­ing out on Twit­ter, tweet­ing my lit­tle heart out. If you’re fol­low­ing me, you now know far too much about my empty shell of an existence.

You’re not fol­low­ing me, hardly any­one is. I don’t know what I expected, per­haps some pied-piper-like effect on peo­ple which had me rivalling the top ech­e­lon of Twit­ter­teers after my first tweet. As fuck­ing if!

Twit­ter is a bit like shout­ing in a crowded room full of shouty peo­ple; get­ting anyone’s atten­tion is prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble. Unless you’re famous already, as it seems proper celebri­ties who join Twit­ter enjoy instant popularity.

I’m only an inter­net celebrity, which should mean some­thing on, um, you know, the inter­net, but it doesn’t. So how does one get noticed on Twitter?

I’m tak­ing the long view, much like I did with blog­ging. If you just keep doing what­ever it is you do, peo­ple will find you and wor­ship you like the one true liv­ing god you are.

The other ques­tion is, how much atten­tion do I want to get on Twit­ter? How much atten­tion do I want to get full stop? I already do OK here in my tiny lit­tle cor­ner of the internet.

I’ll let you in on a lit­tle secret, this web­site is actu­ally prof­itable. I bring in more than I spend, though nat­u­rally that doesn’t include my very valu­able time, which you can’t put a price on.

Well, you could really, I get £750 a day, plus expenses, but you get to keep the pho­tos I take of your hus­band shag­ging his sec­re­tary. Oh no, that’s what a pri­vate detec­tive gets!

If I ever won the lot­tery, I would hire a team of pri­vate detec­tives to dig up dirt on my list of ene­mies. Everyone’s got some­thing secret lurk­ing in their lives that they wouldn’t want any­one to know about. I’d like to know.

Sorry, I attended a spe­cial screen­ing of Frost/Nixon last night and I think a bit of Tricky Dicky’s sleaze rubbed off on me. He famously had an ene­mies list and used inves­ti­ga­tors to dig dirt up on peo­ple. Of course, he did it with tax payer’s money, I want to use the lot­tery cash I will never win because rarely buy a ticket.

My week on Twit­ter has been fun. With the ter­ri­ble win­ter weather here in the UK, I’ve been able to keep track of the snow­fall in real time, com­plete with pho­tos and travel updates. I got instant reac­tions to this week’s crackin’ Bat­tlestar Galac­tica episode and I learned that BBC Radio One DJ, Chris Moyles actu­ally seems like a decent guy.

Moyles (@CHRISDJMOYLES) has been a sur­prise on Twit­ter, he tweets loads and comes across as quite a nice fel­low. Who knew?

I posted my own snowy pho­tos and even a pic­ture of 2 of my cute lit­tle kitty cats. Awwwwww! I’ve also posted some jokes and some sur­real shit too, mainly for my own amusement.

I can cer­tainly see the appeal of Twit­ter. Its sim­ple to use and pro­vides a very focussed ser­vice. It is also extremely addic­tive and easy to dip in and out of many times through­out the day.

It may be that the nov­elty wears off for me and I will get bored of tweet­ing my every thought and action, but for now I’m a tweet­ing machine.

So what are you wait­ing for, don’t you wanna fol­low this hippy? I might lead you to where they are hid­ing the good drugs?

Screw that, if I knew where the good drugs were, I would be tak­ing them right now and not wast­ing my time typ­ing up this drivel!