For various reasons, I am on another sabbatical from Twitter. This is not my first, and I dare say not my last. Duration, unknown. Frankly, I am boring myself and slowly sticking my foot in my own mouth. To fill the now empty space, I have spent more time thinking and writing. So, for instance these are some raw numbers from the last few days. This is by no means scientific.
Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 10,000
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 10%
Words of Value = 1,000
Blogging
Average Tweets per day: 100
Average size of each tweet: 100
Total Words: 2,765
Estimated Percentage valuable (ie: valuable content): 90%
Words of Value = 2,488
So, the question remains: are the conversations on twitter worth 2.5 times the publishing via blogs?
Good onya for going back to blogging for a spell. I’m new to Twitter and I am finding it friendly enough. Though the more you put yourself out into the Twittersphere, the more your likely to attract the scumbags (marketeers). So I’ve had to be careful who is following me, plus I’ve gone private.
Anyway I have come across a guy by the name of Chauncey Thorn who knows a lot of stuff about API calls in Social Network sites (but in a bad way).
I did a search on my name in Google and noticed one listing under CongressSpaceBook (obviously a fake site because of its sketchy graphics) and it shows a list of ALL my tweets in the last few days, plus others that I follow.
If you enter url http://bit.ly/m0qyd but change the xyzzy with anyones Twitter name you will display ALL their tweets PLUS any other media network details (except Facebook). I do believe this is an invasion of privacy. By “reverse engineering” (just forgetting what I just said for a moment) I was able to discover the site is actually operated by CHAUNCEY THORN – see his Facebook Group Page http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=70366056616
He seems to be associated with SunlightLabs http://sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/ which uses API calls to “data mine” inside Media Network sites. His cover is it is used to access congressmen and senators within the US government and it is apparently sanctioned by Hilary Clinton?? But even that is just SO WRONG hacking into a congressman’s personal tweets and Social Media accounts etc.
So I’m wondering what has this person got to gain by mining into everyone’s Tweets and is it being used by CIA for covert ops??. This is pushing the bounds of Open Governance a little too far, don’t you think!!!
This Chauncey Thorn guy needs to have his leesh tightened well and good, but I’m not sure how this is to be done? Any ideas? Stilgherrian may need to know about this too if he is not too sick. I’ll post him.
Thomas Suters.
CongressSpacebook.com is not a fake site. It uses a number of publically available web services like Twitter Search, Flickr, Youtube, BackType, Google Social graph and others to try and make our government more accountable and transparent. And it’s not associated with SunlightLabs (or anyone else), except that I had initially created the site as an entry to a contest they were running.
If your social profile shows up under my site it’s because you made a comment in a blog post, posted a video to youtube, posted photos to flickr and/or have a social networking account that uses XFN and/or FOAF to expose data to Google’s social graph API. I don’t store or harvest anyone’s account information. I don’t filter out content that results from a query. And all content “except” for the congress person’s meta data which is stored in a database is dynamic.