Hakiri

Twitter is full of bots. It should be no big surprise to you, I hope. Bots make the service essentially less useful. For example, how do you know how many out of the 2000 followers are real people with opinion that is valuable to you or your community? You don’t know! Any newbie programmer can code up a simple script to post thoughts, retweet and sync feeds and do other things to the extend you no longer can differentiate between real and spammy traffic.

This is primarily due to the fact that twitter relies on smaller contributions from its userbase (140 characters message), which is significantly easier to imitate than a whole blog post for example. Moreover, messages can be as vague as it can get and in fact, most of them are. Now add the easy to use programmatic access and you have a recipe for disaster.

This leads us to the obvious (to some) conclusion that twitter is not a reliable source of information. Clearly, it can be abused and it is evident that it is abused but not to the extend we will see it getting abused in the future. Twitter is quite popular, no doubt about that, but is it useful? Probably not! I will stick with blogging!

…is what Twitter is. And it fits very well the egocentric nature of most security dudes (el hackerz), and therefore they are all on Twitter, twittering their way out of the rat race. The only problem I see with micro blogging platforms, such as Twitter, is that there is almost no value whatsoever from your contributions but a bunch of meaningless messages – a history of someone’s no so interesting life.

Don’t get me wrong. Twitter is a good social/communication tool. It works well to deliver small messages to the world. However, essentially Twitter is nothing more than a glorified version of an Instant Messaging client where everybody can see what you are saying. It is a personal branding tool – good for staying in touch with your peers in a very open fashion but bad for anything else.

This is the reason why I prefer blogs, wikis, etc. They are designed to build communities and build on the top of information which can later be reused and build upon. Information is important. It drives progression. Twitter creates noise. I guess this is the secret for its success.

Well, everything new will become old! And Twitter’s roots are as old as the Internet, perhaps even more. The idea will fade away with the time and after that it will raise again, repackaged in a shiny new box and given back to the masses.