Andrea on my.opera

It's a while I am noticing some pretty typical Twitter users, so I thought to share some of their portraits with you. You are free to add your own characters if you find more!

the attention whore : usually a girl in her latest teen years, every 2-3 twits she writes some offensive words toward the strangers following her, things like "how come so many creepy **** are reading what I **** write here?" -- they read it cos you are writing public posts in a public service, and they follow you cos they can do it and you are not blocking em. Simple. She could block em and that's all, like every normal mind would do, but her goal is to gather a lot of people having feelings and ideas about her, no matter if good or bad ones. So she spits on everyone, trying to hit someone. She also loves the simple concept of having hundreds of people following her, of course.

the marketing genius : a company pays him/her to spend days adding people to the "following" list, hoping that they will follow back and so read all the marketing noise that company's twitter account will post. If you don't add them back, they will stop following you in 1 day or 2. Epic fail but it could work since a lot of people is "following back" without checking.

the marketing genius, part 2 : same scenario, but their workers/bots get even more aggressive, answering to some of your posts with some hilariously unrelated sentence; you can for instance post this "I think I heard a mouse in my bedroom" and get this as answer "great!why don't you try out 3D mouse?it works in Vista too!" (you go to check who the hell is him and you discover it is a company producing mouses and trackballs for 3d modeling and cad). Euch.

the trending topic master : someone that will post "Today I'll spend a great day out! #iphone #tigerwoods #obama #porn" so that his useless post will be seen by more people, using the trick of adding the hashtags of the trending posts. Just like in past dumb webmasters used to add frequently searched topics to the meta tags of the sites. A variation is the twitter user posting coherent sentences modeled on the trending topic, even if he does it for the same reasons of the other one.

say it once more, John : this twitter user will likely post the same thing at least 3 times in a day, filling your timeline and earning a deserved block. He/she can repeat the same twit 3 times in a row, or repeat a bunch of twits all together every X hours. If he is very smart, he can change the sentence a bit while keeping the same meaning. He just needs you to know he is sad cos Michael Jackson is dead. No I mean, he is very sad. He can't believe it happened for real. He is totally sad, in tears. Broken. Dude, he is suffering. With tears and everything, yes. He is sad. A lot. Cos Michael Jackson died. It can't be real, it is a nightmare. He is so sad, in tears. Yep.

..I know some people that knows some people that robbed some people.. : he is adding every single celebrity he can find, and will often answer to their posts to make it look like he is actually having some kind of dialogue with them. He'll post twits repeating what some celebrity said, but doing it so that it looks like Lindsay Lohan confessed it to him. I mean, c'mon..

unchained melody : he will add you and at first he will look someone normal. Then you will answer a post or two and he won't react. You will send a direct message. Silence. You see he is posting in his account and he is actually alive, but though he started following you he is apparently unable of having a contact with you. You feel like Sam Wheat and you block him.

the almighty Google fan : ok this happened to me only one time but I found it to be so hilarious. The guy was called "googlefan" or something like that -- he started following me for who knows which reason, then he noticed I posted some not positive stuff regarding Google, and he stopped following me instantly, even if what I wrote was basically true. Really, I feel pity for blind fanatics.

I feel I am forgetting some of them. Next post will be about sushi.

It's a while I'm playing with this nice toy that I discovered thanks to a Twitter contact : it's called Poladroid and it's a fun software that tries to simulate a (guess what?) Polaroid camera. And I mean, not only the look of the photos : it also implements the waiting during the development of the photo itself, the sounds, the fingerprints, stripes on the paper, rotation and some more parameters. Here are some of my tests with it (using some old photos I took ages ago) :



I created a Poladroids album here on my.opera, where you can find more of my experiments with the software. All in all it's an entertaining activity and it can also produce some interesting results, depending on the photos you use with it of course. You can download it from their site, and it's free : poladroid.net

Of course we can get similar or even better results with Photoshop or a cheaper tool like Paint.Net, very likely using no filters -- but I think that what makes Poladroid so fun is the same concept behind using an Holga camera : you shoot and wait to see the results, hoping for some happy accident. It's great to drop photos onto the camera icon and see what will happen to our casual snapshots. The software can work with high resolution photos too, so it is not impossible to get a very nice result and print it. The "problem" could be that all the photos will become square, but we can crop em getting rid of the paper frame and bringing them to a non square format. I developed some tricks about that, I'll maybe post about that later.

Ciao people!

That's another side of the I-Need-To-Do-It-Online craziness : on-line document editing. Google Docs and Zoho are the most known on-line office suites, and they are are quite complete and even useful. So what's the deal? Simple : do you trust saving your documents on-line? Where on-line means some server somewhere in this planet. A server you can't physically access. A server that can be accessed by the people working at Zoho and at Google, though of course they say they won't.

If you answer "yes I do trust em" then take a look at this :

Google software bug shared private online documents

yes you did read good : "Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant's online Docs application service. The problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only .05 percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet."

Not breaking news but still scary. And if you think Google is bad and others are better, let's take a look at Zoho, the main contender in on-line docs services :

Zoho Writer flaw highlights disclosure problem in Web 2.0 world

That's plain scary. Those bugs are proving that using on-line docs suites is just not safe. And they're just some of the bugs that we got to know about, who knows how many similar situations happened and we never noticed cos they fixed it silently overnight.

Someone could object : on-line docs suites are great but not for documents containing sensible data. So, are we supposed to use a different office suite depending on how sensible we consider our data? Sensible data is not only credit card numbers and similar stuff. If I am writing docs about my job activities, they are sensible even if only a doc containing a bunch of lines and few images, maybe a proof of concept for a commission. If I'm in a rant mood and I write down some nasty lines about my job boss or the husband of my sister, that's sensible too. Even a list of things I bought last week is sensible from some point of view. Almost everything can be considered sensible, so what are we supposed to use on-line docs suites for? Only useless crap we could very likely not even write? Do we have to think "is it fine if what I am writing becomes public domain cos of a bug?" before starting writing something?

Bugs can happen in every software scenario, problem is that if we put our documents on-line we are building the chance for those bugs to make our private data not private anymore. It happened and it can happen again. Reality proved it, no matter the marketing they try to apply to that, to make people think that "it is cool to be in the cloud, share stuff, do everything on-line". Facts are proving such services are not safe. Just like emails are not -- they give you 2gb, 5gb of space and tell you : "ok leave all of your emails and attachments here, no need for erasing things anymore! isn't it cool?" so that they can scan your e-mails and harvest for info they can sell to marketing companies; they write in TOS that they'll do it, but people is usually not reading TOS and they know it. That's the business model behind GMail, for instance : we give you a huge free space, you fill it with e-mails, we scan those mails and sell the info to third companies (that could mean selling directly to them or use the info to generate ads to propose to you) -- everything is anonymous they swear, but do you trust someone that one morning lets thousands of strangers read your private data?

And to finish : Google Chrome browser is nice, fast and everything -- but it doesn't let you manage cookies. Yeah, it's like that. You can just "accept all" or "refuse all" cookies basically. Since user needs cookies for using websites where he/she needs to login and where he/she is required to provide data (like sites asking your age before letting you enter), the average user will likely leave cookies on "accept all" since he/she is not wanting to keep changing that option going through menus etc. Cookies are used to gather info, Google makes money with such info, so they want you to accept all cookies they need you to accept. I don't like that. I don't like that a company tries to look good and cool and everything, giving software "for free" while we are paying for it instead, only that we don't pay with money but with information. 99€ can be a price I can understand and accept or refuse to pay, but how can I give a value to the information about my life? Do you think Google is giving the users a detailed and correct view on what does it mean to use Google Services? Most users are not informed about it, they get the hyped comic-book like video explaining why Chrome is so fancy, and how come they were so great creating a new browser for the new web, but they don't say that you can't selectively manage cookies and so Chrome is basically a Google terminal for information gathering. That's unfair, from my point of view.

Anyway, the post was about on-line docs suites ridiculous privacy level, not on how much I disapprove Google-like business model

I hope I didn't bore you too much people Ciao!

PS : I am trying to draw but in latest times my creative mind is almost sleeping it seems. Maybe it's the weather, maybe a lack of motivation. Maybe both. We will see. I suppose I still have some things bothering me and not letting me concentrate on creating.