Structured Thought . ORG

It truly is amazing, the speed at which information moves in this day and age. I had heard a lot in the past about how quickly news spreads via Social Networking media like Twitter. Many times, Twitter will be talking about something several hours before the major networks have anything published. This is not always a good thing, however.

Today gave us an example of both the speed at which the information travels, and how quickly a rumor can turn to fact.

At approximately 11:15 am EDT today, the @BreakingNews Twitter account sent the following tweet:

Florida-based radio station KissFM reports that Patrick Swayze has reportedly died. BNO News is working to get more information.

At the time of this writing, at least 1,000 (a conservative estimate, I’m sure) tweets were sent pertaining to the subject. What was interesting was the ‘Telephone Game Effect’ that took hold almost instantly. The first tweet, relatively innocuous in the vein of ‘Hey, we heard this, we’re checking it out. Back to you soon’. Within minutes, however, poor Mr. Swayze was 3/4 buried.

Now, the kicker: He’s not dead. About 15 minutes ago, Mr. Swayze’s publicist stated that he is, in fact, alive. More information is coming in that he’s not doing well, and has possibly been hospitalized, but the fact remains: He’s not dead.

So, over the space of an hour, an unconfirmed report turned into absolute fact. Patrick’s Wikipedia entry was updated, corrected, updated again, and re-corrected, CNN had hastily posted and (just as quickly) taken down an article/obituary, and many people were led to believe this to be true.

So, kids, what can we learn from all of this?

News Organizations and outlets: Be very careful about what gets published. Today, people are more in tune to what’s happening in the world than they ever have before. News spreads in an instant, and it’s nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Once a false story gets out, the only thing that can be done is damage control. However, retractions and corrections can only get one so far. Credibility is a news org’s stock in trade, and any hits to the public’s perception can be deadly. Balancing the need to get out first with information with ensuring that the data is correct is an artform that very few, if any, have mastered.

Public: Be careful about what you read. Don’t always take the first source of reporting as fact. Many times, the first report that gets out either has some piece, or possibly the entire story incorrect. Take the time to verify and validate sources before coming to your conclusions. The ReTweet has become a great tool for helping to spread information. But, if the information being spread is incorrect, the signal-to-noise ratio (which is already pitifully weak) takes a major hit and makes it difficult for everyone else to be properly informed.

I have seen this question come up quite a bit in Twitter discussions, so I thought I’d detail what’s happening, and why spammers have decided to attempt to use Twitter to forward their mission.

Background:

Anyone who knows me knows my opinion on spammers, scammers, and other generally nefarious characters. I find it the lowest of the low to make one’s living at the expense of the innocence, trust, or ignorance of others. I have gone on record saying that the world would be a better place without these individuals, and I’m really not opposed to any methods that might bring about their removal from the planet.

Anyway, spammers will attach themselves to any form of media that they believe MIGHT give them the slightest edge, and possibly bring them a couple of bucks. What spammers don’t realize (partly because they’re just plain greedy, and partly because they’re just dumb), is that abusing the systems that they latch on to (much like lampreys onto sharks), will only stay afloat as long as the system is usable (just like any other parasite). Too much abuse of the system makes it unusable, and therefore unfit for spamming. Because of this, any time a new service, even one that people think might be un-spammable, like Twitter, spammers flock to new services in droves, all looking for that one click that might increase the CPM for their ‘customer’.

How the Spammers are Using Twitter:

As I said above, spammers are not abusing Twitter because they make money off of it. Why or how, then, you ask, do spammers use Twitter? Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

Indexing is the Key:

The largest search engine on the Internet is Google. Google uses webcrawling robots both to build its database, and help with developing rankings for pages. The best way to have your page increase its page rank is to get it linked from a lot of different places. Each time the Google crawler comes across a link to your page, one part of your page rank increases. As the page rank goes up, the higher your page shows up in search results of topics related to your content.

Spammers Abuse Indexing, Not Twitter:

So, Google’s webcrawler comes across someone’s Twitter page. I’ll link mine, for an example. When it arrives on the page, it takes a catalog of every link it sees. Next, it follows each of those links to see where they go, adding to the database every step of the way. Here’s the key: Every person’s Twitter page has a link to their list of followers. When the crawler hits that link, it sees a list of every person following that user, even those that the user doesn’t follow back. The crawler then goes and hits each of those Twitter pages, following every link, and indexing everything on those pages as well.

This is the key. If a spammer is following 12,000 people, Google’s crawler will eventually hit their Twitter page 12,000 times, artificially inflating that Twitter page’s popularity. Consequently, the spam pages that the Twitter page links to also has its popularity artificially inflated, temporarily raising that page’s position in search results. Since a spammer’s ultimate goal is to have its ‘clients’ pages show up in the organic search results, these artificial bursts of popularity are a quick and easy way to make a buck.

I hope this has helped shed some light on the seemingly useless abuse of Twitter by spammers. It’s not just people that post undesirable content, it’s people abusing a useful tool at the expense of legitimate users. The very small idealistic side of me believes that some day, the Internet will be a good place again, where people can share ideas freely, without the threat of useless wastes of flesh that try to make a few bucks at the expense of others.

I’m not sure what’s going on in the Twitterverse, but I’ve been getting a lot of followers without notification lately. I can only imagine two possibilities:

1. Twitter’s email notification is not working at 100%, and messages are being dropped (they’re not showing up in my spam box, either) or not sent at all.
2. Spammers have found a way to game the system by following people without them being notified.

I hope it’s number 1, but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. Every stealth follower I’ve had, with the exception of 2 or 3 has been a spam account. I have also gotten notification messages from legitemate followers in between getting followed by spammers, which leads me to lean more toward the first.

I’m posting this here, because I don’t want to send it to just @ev and @biz.

Please, Twitter, investigate this. I’m betting I’m not nearly the only person seeing this, and many people just may not be noticing. Keeping the spammers away from this system is the only way to continue to keep it a viable service.

Honestly, companies. Nobody is going to take you seriously when you continue to do stupid stuff like trying to make people stop using ‘your’ color.

News flash: Colors have been around a LOT longer than any company ever to have existed.

Thanks to Veronica Belmont of Mahalo Daily, I will display this image to attempt to help explain to people how ridiculous companies can be.

Robert Scoble (not the nano-projected hologram) follows a LOT of people on Twitter (16,992 at last check). Because of this, he gets asked the same question quite often “What’s it like to follow that many people?”

Today, he got tired of answering viat Twitter and showed us via video. If you listen carefully, you can even hear him say my Twitter name when I send a Tweet while watching.

So, what does all of this power and flood of information do for us? Think of it this way, every follower you have means that number of people are instantly informed of whatever it was you had to say at that moment. So, when Scoble Tweets, 16,000 people know it. Conversely, he is informed instantly when any one of us nearly 17,000 people say something. That’s a lot of information to process, yes, but when filtered properly, it can be a very very powerful tool.

Say, for example, you’re following 3,000 people, scattered throughout the world. At any given time, you’re getting information from each of those places instantaneously, as it happens. You don’t have to wait for the major media to pick it up and put it on TV or the radio. You don’t have to wait for web junkies to craft 800-word dissertations on the effects of the events on the poor of the affected area. You get instant snippets into what’s going on.

Think of it this way: Company A, in which you own stock decides to buy Company B for 20% over the current share price. A tech-savvy member of Company B’s board Tweets ‘Yes! Company A is buying us for $53/share!’, immediately after leaving the filing meeting. Company B is currently trading at $42/share. You are now privy to information that hasn’t hit the media or even the market yet, but is still public information, and therefore not ‘Insider Trading’ (at least, I don’t think so, maybe an econ lawyer can step up and confirm for me). You can now buy Company B stock at $42 and wait for the spike in both Company A and Company B as the news trickles out.

Pretty interesting stuff, methinks.

So, Patrick had an interesting idea on how to leverage the power of Twitter.

His idea is to basically create a referral chain, allowing people to subscribe to each others blogs and Twitters, creating a mass of people that now communicate with each other automatically.

This also has the potential side-benefit of driving more traffic to your own site. And, if you’re like me and are using things to attempt to monetize your traffic, you might even see a financial benefit.

So, everyone check out the post and get to the subscribing.

So, it appears that Toshiba’s getting out of the HD-DVD game. This is pretty much the final nail for the format considering it was Toshiba’s deal.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.

As much as I hate to see anything into which people have invested money go away (LaserDisc, anyone), I’m glad to see the industry moving to one format for several reasons:

• BluRay will more quickly become ubiquitous, encouraging non-Sony hardware manufacturers to get in the game.
• More manufacturers means cheaper hardware.
• Full studio cooperation means more availability.
• More movie availability means cheaper movies.
• Microsoft will likely very soon release a BluRay add-on for XBox360 (and eventually integrate it into the console), driving game prices for both consoles down.
• Blank media will go down in price.
• Computer drives (for when I build my MediaCenter PC) will drop in price as the extra firmware to support HD-DVD can be removed.

I’m also glad that we’re not going to have a situation like we still do with DVD+R and DVD-R. Granted, dual-format recordable drives can’t get much cheaper, but I think they would have come down in price much more quickly with only one format.

Personally, I thought the perceived battle was over almost right away since NEC released a laser/receiver combination that supported both formats within a year of their release.

Now I can feel a little better about picking up a PS3 when I’m ready, though.