Just Because You Can Is Not An Excuse – Ireland.com’s Stupid Automated Twitter Messages

Whether it’s technology or life in general you’ll always run into people doing odd things. When you ask them why they did it they’ll simply reply:

“Because I could”

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that it’s either a good idea or even advisable.

Take Twitter (again!)

Using a 3rd party service you can automate a lot of things. So when someone new follows your user you can send your new “fan” a message.

Unfortunately most people don’t know how to use this kind of service properly and end up simply abusing it.

Spammers send you affiliate links and general rubbish that you could live without.

What about Ireland.com?

You’d think that a company of their size would have more sense, but they obviously still don’t “get” Twitter.

Their Twitter account sent me this useless rubbish at around 6am this morning a few hours after I “followed” them:
“Thanks for following www.Ireland.com we are always interested in Real stories from Real people passionate about Ireland – Why not share you views – Or visit the site for News, Sport, Gigs, Email, TV, Booking Hotels, etc”

Considering the amount of automated spammy messages I get my only reaction to this is – unfollow immediately. It leaves me wondering if Ireland.com have any semblance of a clue about how to use Twitter.

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The Apocalypse Is Upon Us (sort of)

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Today marks the day that Twitter “apocalypse” is upon us.

You can read more about it here.

Looks like most of the main stream Twitter clients updated to deal with the anomaly (or had already coded around it)

Remember the Y2K bug? Remember how it was meant to mean the end of civilisation?

We’re still here …

Funny that.