AaronFreedman.com

Twitter Fraud

It was inevitable. It was doomed to happen from the start. Yes, today, the first major case of Twitter fraud occurred. Twitter, as I blogged about before, is a site where you can simply say what you are doing at any given moment, and track what your “friends”* are doing. Well now, Leo Laporte, head of the TWiT.tv podcast netcast network, has had his identity hijacked on Twitter. This was done because, after Laporte recently ditched Twitter for Jaiku (which I’ll get to later), someone else created an account with his same username.

To me, this is just a case of what happens when you create services that allow someone to be “you” without any physical proof. Of course, this really only applies to celebrities (which Leo Laporte is in the geek world). This is why more services really need to incorporate OpenID.

Jaiku

After reading Leo Laporte’s blog post on it, I decided to check out Jaiku. Jaiku is very similar to Twitter, in the sense that it allows you to say what you’re doing and follow what others are doing. It even features a very similar, if slightly more cluttered yet featured, interface. But, Jaiku also has more than Twitter. For one, you can comment on other people’s updates, put little icons in your updates, and use the phone client. Jaiku also has the very cool feature of fetching posts form RSS feeds that you specify, and then turning them into updates. This works great for adding updates for blog posts, Flickr photos, and even feeding in Twitter updates.

Of course, Jaiku does have its faults. One, is that it’s much smaller than Twitter, so much less people are on it. Also, it doesn’t yet support posting via IM, and I couldn’t get my cell phone verified with it. Jaiku’s API is also very new, so there isn’t yet a great desktop client for it, such as what Twitterific is for Twitter. Jaiku seems to have a lot of promise, but I don’t think I’ll be devoting a lot of time to it right now.

Blog Realizations

I’ve had this blog for about 15 months now, and I rarely post on it. The truth is, well I have better things to do with my limited free time. For example, instead of writing this post, I could be:

• Writing a MacUser post, which a) would get a avstly larger audience than this post, and b) I would actually get paid for.
• Editing my podcast, which gets many more times the listenership than the breadefrship of this blog, is improitant enough to get me to meet a Dell PR rep, gets me free stuff to review, and got a 6-month ad deal.
• Evaluating the Apple TV for my podcast.
• Sending a review copy request for Guitar Hero II, and sending podcast interview requests.
• Getting off my tush and reading something, such as The Looming Tower or Barron’s. Sure, this isn’t more productive, but it gets me off the computer and “stretches my brain.”

So, the point is, why should I be blogging now, with a teeny-weeny audience. Forget the lack of payment, who even is going to read this? I guess this is the realization that all bloggers avoid, because it causes their entire world to self-destruct in on them. In the end, why do I or anyone else have a blog, a tumblelog, a Twitter, etc? I mean, I almost never check my Facebook, my tumblelog and Jaiku are just portals to other services which I don’t even use that much (del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.), so what’s the point of it all? To put my existence on every corner of the web? Make my ego bigger? I honestly do not know.

So, I guess my posting on this blog won’t be up to “blogworthy standards,” whatever that means. For a more blog-like blog, see my friend Austen’s Netsua, Cyrus’s blog, or even Shira’s Bungalow Babe. But for now, by dear but few readers, I bid you adieu (at least until my next post, which will be in God-knows-how-long).

*”Friends” being the MySpace definition, which is people who you simply add to an online list of contacts, or people who can view your page of some sort, Entirely different from the modern English definition.

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