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So I finally succumbed and joined twitter.

20 April 2011 21:50

So I've succumbed and joined twitter. I'm pretending I'm a photographer, rather than a techie/geeky/random person, whether that persists is anybodys guess.

At the very least I don't feel any real need to write/post/ask about Linux, development, or similar. I can do that here or elsewhere. (Not least because length-restrictions are annoying; yes it is true. Size is important.)

So far I've been posting semi-random pictures, I guess that is one way to pass the time, while I play with my camera.

ObQuote: "Please, please, please drive faster!" - Wanted.

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A brief twitter experiment

13 July 2014 21:50

So I've recently posted a few links on Twitter, and I see followers clicking them. But also I see random hits.

Tonight I posted a link to http://transient.email/, a domain I use for "anonymous" emailing, specifically to see which bots hit the URL.

Within two minutes I had 15 visitors the first few of which were:

IP User-Agent Request
199.16.156.124Twitterbot/1.0;GET /robots.txt
199.16.156.126Twitterbot/1.0;GET /robots.txt
54.246.137.243python-requests/1.2.3 CPython/2.7.2+ Linux/3.0.0-16-virtualHEAD /
74.112.131.243Mozilla/5.0 ();GET /
50.18.102.132Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.17.0-rc (gzip)HEAD /
50.18.102.132Google-HTTP-Java-Client/1.17.0-rc (gzip)HEAD /
199.16.156.125Twitterbot/1.0;GET /robots.txt
185.20.4.143Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TweetmemeBot/3.0; +http://tweetmeme.com/)GET /
23.227.176.34MetaURI API/2.0 +metauri.comGET /
74.6.254.127Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp);GET /robots.txt

So what jumps out? The twitterbot makes several requests for /robots.txt, but never actually fetches the page itself which is interesting because there is indeed a prohibition in the supplied /robots.txt file.

A surprise was that both Google and Yahoo seem to follow Twitter links in almost real-time. Though the Yahoo site parsed and honoured /robots.txt the Google spider seemed to only make HEAD requests - and never actually look for the content or the robots file.

In addition to this a bunch of hosts from the Amazon EC2 space made requests, which was perhaps not a surprise. Some automated processing, and classification, no doubt.

Anyway beer. It's been a rough weekend.

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Goodbye twitter

11 March 2020 10:30

I was slow to start using twitter, but found it a lot of fun. Often it would be useful at times when websites were slow; I'd hop to the website and search "edinburgh network", "github down", or "helsinki outage" and find live updates as people disclosed problems before the appropriate companies updated their status pages.

I've found a lot of useful information, in near real-time, over the past few years. For example I remember hearing a loud explosion a few years back and had no idea what it was. Turns out it was an electrical substation catching fire nearby.

Anyway recently I've been getting a lot of fake notifications, things that aren't real:

  • In case you missed XXX's tweet.

You can't disable these notifications, the only thing you can do is click "see less often". For a couple of days I did that every time I saw them, to no avail.

So I'm done. I've removed references to my account anywhere I could spot them, and I've signed out for good.

(I read twitter on my desktop 99% of the time, though I did use my mobile phone to make posts, especially when images/pictures were involved.)

I've not deleted my account, but I'd uninstalled the application and deleted the entry from my password-store. No doubt in a few years they'll delete my account, though they seem to have recently backtracked on their attempts to nuke inactive accounts.

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