Tag: twitter

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life politics technology

Meet the Other David Miller – Torontoist

Let us tell you a few things about David Miller.

He’s wary of socialized healthcare. He’s in favour of weakening the federal government, and he also supports strict caps on income tax for individuals and corporations. Yeah, turns out David Miller’s a really conservative guy. How’d he ever get elected mayor of a city with such a strong lefty contingent? Oh, right. He didn’t.

Actually, he doesn’t even live in Canada.

David Miller of Bountiful, Utah, a conservative blogger (his site is actually a pretty good read), has politics very different from those of our own soon-to-depart Mayor Miller. But the two men do have one thing in common, aside from a name: they’re both active on Twitter, where Mayor Miller uses the handle @mayormiller, and David-from-Utah goes by @davidmiller.

This was how I was publicly introduced to the people of Toronto by the Torontoist. They picked up on the fact that I was being incorrectly linked in messages to/about the mayor of Toronto and thought it was funny enough that they asked me if they could do a story about it. It was a fun read – and I got a few random tweets out of it today – thought I’d share it here.

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life pictures technology

What’s in a Name?

Despite the fact that I have had my twitter account for over two years I’m still pretty low on the twitter curve. Let’s put it this way after more than two years of having the account I currently have a total of 47 updates to my credit. Truthfully I ignored twitter after getting the account until recently when I decided that it might be interesting to see what’s happening in the twitterverse. It did not take very long before I noticed that I get lots of tweets directed at me from people I don’t know. I just assumed that this was another example of the dangers of having a common name. I got on twitter early enough that I was not forced to use a name like “whatdoyoucallaguywithnonicknameswhenhisnameistaken” when I created the account. I was lucky enough to get a nice simple “davidmiller.”

I have long known that there are many David Millers around (such as the Mayor of Toronto – yet one more reason I should go visit there) and I assumed that I was getting tweets from people who assumed that “davidmiller” on twitter belonged to a David Miller that they knew. Finally today I noticed that more than half of the tweets directed at me from people who obviously don’t know me contained links from blip.fm – I know nothing about the site except that from the content of the tweets it is obviously oriented around listening to music. I finally got curious and asked the people who recently sent me blip related tweets why they were sending them. The answer I got was:

holyshadow@davidmiller cause they have integrated twitter and blip, and since you have the same nick, you receive the blips on twitter. that answers?

So now I know why I may be the only person on twitter who has blocked more people than he follows (blocking people means that I don’t get informed every time they send a tweet my way) – due the the mashup nature of so many social networking services I am getting random tweets because some other David Miller has the same username on blip.fm as I have on twitter.com – I wonder if I can just block tweets that contain a url from blip?

Categories
technology

Twitter

It seems that I can’t help but hear about Twitter. I’ve been hearing about it for a while from a number of people who’s technology opinions I respect. Again today I read more from Alan about Twitter. Twitter is one of those things I have not picked up but eventually I have to ask myself “why not?” Thankfully Alan’s post pointed me to an analysis of Twitter that explained why I have not touched it yet. Besides talking about what Twitter is (which I knew, and it’s fine even though I have not touched it) there is a comparison of what it’s like. It is compared to instant messaging, which is also fine, but I don’t use it much – it does not suit me as well as other tools. (By the way, someone ought to make a Web 2.0 version of Twitter, they could call it Warblr – I can’t believe the audacity of people who would leave all the vowels intact 😉 )

After reading the analysis I thought I should see if Twitter does have some use for me, even if it never consumes me. I decided that it might suit for the many articles that I come across which are worthy of a blog post but which I often never get back to posting about. I created a Twitter profile an then thought about what I was doing. I remembered del.icio.us which is for bookmarking pages like I was thinking. When I first heard about del.icio.us my thoughts were much like Twitter – fine, but it does not suit my patterns. Now my patterns have changed enough that it might be a good fit. I created an account and I am starting to mark pages that I might want to post about later. When I get time I will get that list displayed in my sidebar in case anyone out there cares to read the things that I’d like to post about but never do.