Stop Embarrassing Yourself

Twitter. I love it. If I’m connected to the internet, I’m on Twitter. I don’t send a lot of tweets (that’s what they call the 140 character or less messages on Twitter), but I do enjoy reading the tweets of people I admire or just find interesting. It’s a good way to get quick up to the minute information about their podcasts, blog entries, appearances, shows, parties, projects, streaming videos, what they are reading, watching and eating for lunch.

Unfortunately there where some technical difficulties this weekend (something about the new cache system) and popular peoples (those with more than hundred followers) tweets weren’t showing up on the home page. So you had to got to each individuals page to read their tweets. It was a little annoying, but Twitter is a free service and it wasn’t completely broken, just sprained. Now I had to decide which people I thought where the most interesting and visit there individual pages.

Luckily they had everything working yesterday and I was able to continue following the lives of the people I’ve come to think of as my Twitter friends.

Then today I heard that some users private direct messages where showing up on their main page where anyone could read them. Oops. Personally I would never use a service like Twitter to send sensitive or embarrassing personal messages, but still this would be a huge security blunder. It’s one thing if an active attacker can get to someone’s private data (like on almost every other social networking site). Of course the guys at Twitter aren’t that lame. It turns out the problem was caused by a 3rd party service called group tweet that the twitter users configured incorrectly.

Finally as if to prove that bad things always come in threes Twitters lead architect, Blaine Cook, has left. Blain Cook described his departure as “amicable“, whatever that means.

No, seriously, I had to look it up in Wiktionary. It means showing friendliness or goodwill.