The Apocalypse Is Upon Us (sort of)

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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.

Hype Gone Mad – Facebook Custom URL Madness

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Image via CrunchBase

Earlier today Facebook launched their latest “service” – custom URLs for your profile or page.

Talk about hype gone mad!

While a lot of the other social media hubs have offered people the opportunity to use a short and memorable URL to reach their profile page for ages and done it as if it were “no big deal” (it’s not really!), Facebook has managed to make a simple “feature” appear as if it were “the next big thing”.

Expect to see lots of inane blog posts about in the coming days…

Reality check.

Facebook is, in many respects, a “walled garden”.

If you are not “friends” with someone chances are you either can’t see their profile at all or you can only see a very small and not particularly useful page.

In order to see everything you need to be logged in.

The “pages” are a different matter and have been reachable via relatively “sane” URLs for ages.

So what’s all the fuss about?

Frankly, I can’t understand it, so I had to giggle when I read Anil Dash’s post on the entire thing. One to bookmark!

It’s the summer – maybe people just need to go lie on a beach for a while with a good book instead of worrying about their usernames ….

Don’t Annoy Your Followers

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Image via CrunchBase

Remember all the “wonderful” messages you used to get on Facebook? “You’ve been bitten by a vampire” etc., etc.,

They may have been fun if you were a twelve year old, but if you spend any length of time online these kind of interruptions just become annoying.

Now over on Twitter the same kind of thing happens.

This time round the latest annoyance is called SpyMaster, which is supposedly in “private beta”.

In typical web 2.0 fluffy language they’ve got the worst kept secret in Twitterville. Not only does everyone know about it, but they’ve also setup their application in such a way that it spams thousands of other Twitter users via “direct message”!

End result – not only has the application managed to alienate potential users, but it’s also managed to upset thousands of users who weren’t even playing the game.

You can see all the “tweets” from people playing and people complaining about the game here

Moral of the story – don’t annoy people