“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” — Dr. Seuss, The Lorax. Next month marks 12 long years since I joined Twitter. I distinctly recall an early conversation while walking to lunch with the dev team I was managing then, joking about how Twitter was used primarily to let people know you were on your way to the bathroom, or you were back from the bathroom. It all seems so simple and…
A few days ago, I noticed a new follower that didn’t look quite right. Check it out for yourself (@KoriWilbur). I’ve never been a fan of people who use Twitter just to spray links – especially if they all lead back to the same site. There’s very little value in such a Twitter account. But when an account like this shows up, and all of the tweets have something in them that looks like a pattern (here the “$ ”…
Within the last few weeks, a very annoying trend on Twitter began to pique my curiosity. I saw random accounts that don’t follow me marking some of my tweets as favorites. What was weird though was the tweets that were getting marked weren’t, frankly, my best work. But I started noticing more about these accounts. First of all, as I said, the accounts that seemed odd were generally marking odd tweets as favorites. Take this tweet for instance, which has…
Early Aug. 2012 – Short of information about how the Windows Store, the forthcoming home for Windows Store (nee Metro) applications was doing, I began exploring the store, trying to assess how many applications were actually there. I had heard rumblings of 400 or so applications. As I said late in Sept. 2012, my intentions were never malicious. I pondered whether there was any way to query the store programmatically. Here’s how it went down. Aug. 15, 2012 – I had…
The Prestige is one of my favorite movies. Every time I watch it, I notice a nuanced plot twist that I missed before. Since I started counting, the second most frequent question I get after, “how many apps are there?” is, “how are you doing this?” “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.” Back in August,…