[LINK] More KevinPM - crashed site

[Stilgherrian]

On 16/11/2008, at 11:24 AM, Lea de Groot wrote:
> Riiiight...
> 600 followers will crash Twitter.
> Hasn't anyone seen Robert Scoble?
> http://twitter.com/Scobleizer
> Or Guy Kawasaki?
> http://twitter.com/guykawasaki
>
> If these guys can have 20 and 30,000 followers, i can't imagine how a
> lousy 600 can crash anything.

Precisely. It was Twitter's anti-spam control:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_twitter_anti-spam_bot_causes_chaos.php

A new account which suddenly follows a lot of people is flagged as  
suspicious. Spam-robots do this, joining a pile of popular people and  
working out from there because they know a proportion of Twitter users  
will automatically follow back anyone who follows them... and most  
will at least look at their profile and see the advertising message  
therein.



> and crashing a *page*
> Interesting concept.
>
> :shakes head:


Indeed.

My guess is that we see two lay-person linguistics issues here...
1. "crash" = general word for a computer-related error
2, "page" = place on the Internet, as in "my MySpace page".

I also suspect that the spokeswoman was the one talking to the  
journalist because she was the one "authorised" to speak, rather than  
being the one who knew what was going on. Once more, centralised  
command and control causes miscommunication.

Stil


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