On the correlation between conservatism and education

I was in a fairly regular Twitter conversation with Vijay Vijayasankar (meaning: anything goes) and it happened again: right in between the bartalk, something clever was born. See the dialogue above please, top-down, transscribed here:

@vijayasankarv The abundance of ignorance and misinformation among Americans, especially conservative ones, is staggering

@MartijnLinssen not sure if that is a problem with just conservatives..ppl think in extremes on both sides I think

@vijayasankarv I guess so. It's just that conservatism and lack of education is highly correlated - throughout the world

@vijayasankarv Having said that... if there *is* a correlation, that means conservative parties/govs must do their best to cripple education

@MartijnLinssen that is an interesting hypothesis

Ticking the TOS box means you Agree

There has been some fuss about Google+ deleting someone's profile picture as it showed him giving the middle finger, aka flipping the bird.
Google deleted the profile picture, without notice.
Apparently Mr. Siegler doesn't like G+ doing so, as he can have the same profile picture on Twitter "and other services", as he claims. What does that have to with the price of tea in China?
Mr. Siegler then continues to whine about Google's real naming policy, as if that has anything to do with it either

Afraid of socmediots? Email works just as well

A giant reputation drama has been unfolding since yesterday: Ocean Marketing's Paul Cristoforo has made a complete ass of himself and his company.
A nice compilation is provided by Doug Collins on his blog, and it's aptly called How to Commit Career Suicide

The (apparently almost) entire email thread can be found on Penny Arcade's website right here. It's long, and unbelievably persistent in its bad form

Especially given the time of year and the usual predictions, I find this a splendid example of the fact that email isn't dead yet, and that you really don't need a social media policy

The Law of the Handicap of a Headstart

In discussions about SAP's new stealth weapon, HANA, I have come to become a wee weary. At SAP Inside Track NL we joked about it:

@jonerp @dahowlett @ragtag @applebyj like we said at #sitNL "When lost for words, just end your sentence with HANA and you'll be fine"

What is HANA? In short, it uses SSD storage combined with a lot of in-memory to speed up results. SAP's claim is 3600 times faster results achieved with SAP HANA 1.0 with one 4-way, 8 core server (2.27 GHz clock speed) with 0.5 TB of Main Memory, 2 TB of SSD storage, 1Gb Ethernet running on an open source operating system.

The Perfect Self-Help Mistake

[Photo by jessamyn]

The world is full of Self-help books, coaches, trainers, teachers, gurus - basically anyone self-taught to self-help him- or herself, is also able to help anyone else - it seems

Naturally these self-helpers all preach different ways to the same solution: heal yourself, make yourself better. Quotes that make sense or "go straight to the heart" are one manifestation of this that they all share, and in general the similarities can be summed up into two simple truths: 1) they promise you a better life, 2) if you do what they tell you

Where have we heard that before? Thousands of years of oppression by religion, politics, tradition and in one word, institutionalisation, come to mind, each of which has used these same rules. I've come to call it the False Promise, and it's based on a Lie you're not allowed to question

SAP meets Cloud: something needs to vaporise first

[Photo by John Kerstholt]

I have been comfortably following SAP Influencer Summit 2011 from my chair, and reading up on the various posts and vids released throughout the process. It won't surprise anyone that yesterday's keywords were cloud, ByD, business, SAPonDemand and sales - thank you, you 350 participants who produced 1,500 tweets during the last day

Many people ask the question: with such a traditional on-premise company, will these extremes form a perfect match that complements and makes for combined strength, or will it just be a very unhappy marriage?

Migration 101 - follow the white rabbit

It seems that not every migration is welcomed by applause these days, reasons for which can usually be attributed to a definite lack of success. So, here's a checklist that will help you achieve success. Of course the list is condensed and a lot of detail is left out, as it's just a lot of work to do a proper, prepared and tested, migration - but this is a pretty good approach

Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW

I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in - after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages.
A few months after that, Twitter finally changed its security model and now it makes a distinction between complete access, or access to the account without Direct Messages

A little bit better, but still a major failure - as just got proven by spammers

Klout 'o Calypse: 2.5 million people can't be wrong

I wrote an initial post on people killing their Klout on the very same day that Klout enabled them to do so. I took tweets as a basis for my testset, and it appeared that 20% of (the 300) people tweeting about being able to delete your Klout profile, also had actually done so.
Two weeks after that, this percentage had grown to 25%: of those initial 300 people, 75 had deleted their Klout profile. Wow!
Then I read an interview by Rohn Jay Miller with Klout's CEO Joe Fernandez, who stated that less than 0.01% of users have deleted their Klout profile

25% on my side, 0.01% on Joe's - that gap definitely deserves closer investigation. How many people have deleted their Klout profile? The answer is right here

Big Data needs Big Collection and Big Execution

[Image by John M. Kennedy T]


Big Data is the new buzz it seems, and I must say I have been sceptic of it since I first saw the very word - or phrase, what is it?
As an IT architect, I've always equaled data to databases, and information to applications - and knowledge to the people on top of these

For one, I think you can very easily handle the perceived issue when dropping the data, and acting on the information instead. Since when did databases contain useful information?

Vijay Vijayasankar wrote a good post on it, and I'd like to add to that from another point of view

Integration is the new Operation - this decade and next

I gave a presentation the other day that is a very short version of my Integration book. As usual, that forced me to compact thoughts and ideas, and craft a new visual - see above.
I've used that already in a post the other day, but that didn't pay proper attention to it

I'm a bit tired of all the use of the word integrated and integration over the last few weeks and months. I would like to say: "You keep using that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means"

Consumer and enterprise IT company analysis

In January this year I did an analysis of "classical" US IT companies: Google, Microsoft and Apple, which are targeting consumers, and Oracle, SAP, IBM and HP, which are targeting companies.
Yes that's a fairly big generalisation but please allow me to do so...

This is the update which includes the next year, I need to find a good moment to do so because they have different book years and being US-based or European also means different publication dates for the same results.
Anyway, I took revenue and operating profit (also known as operating income, earnings from operations, income from operations, income before income taxes), and here are the absolute figures for "GMA":

Asphalt that controls traffic type and flow?

This weekend I attended the SAP Inside track NL event, held at Ciber HQ in Eindhoven. The event was great, and I really enjoyed it but would have loved to stay longer and gotten more involved.
What has followed are great conversations and discussions, new people to follow on Twitter and elsewhere, and lots of topics to talk about

One of the inputs for that is the presentation I gave at #sitNL

Flout.me is fun, but should be flogged and reported

I did what I guess most of you did when you saw the first entry of flout.me in your Twitter timeline: frown. Then I saw another one. And another one. And smiled. I clicked the URL, authorised the app, then laughed out loud

Looks familiar? Well, there's more to it than that: Flout is a Klout superstar!

An Occupy miscarriage conspiracy theory? Please, don't

Jennifer Fox is the name of the Seattle Occupy protester whose video and words have gone viral in the last 2 days, claiming police pepper spray and physical abuse led her to miscarry her 3 months old foetus

When I read about it, the images shocked me: a deeply hurt Fox seems to be fighting a dozen emotions at the same time: pepper spray, pain, worries about her baby, shock, you name it.
However, the dozen or so blog posts and news paper articles I read left me with questions. The major one of those was about how they possibly could lose verification out of sight in their hurry to be sucked along into the publish stream of yet another SEO hype. Bloggers, journalists: the majority of you should be very, very ashamed for spinelessly republishing a major news story without asking any questions or performing any checks

Once bitten, twice shy? Klout scores get clouted again

Almost 1.5 years ago I showed how very, very flawed Klout's actually is. I made some nice screenshots and illustrated how Klout's scoring is statistically impossible, and how they magically manage to present you with two scores at the same time.
Today, history repeats itself, proving that Klout is still just as immature a product as they were in June 2010. Apparently, some need to fail more than once in order to learn something

The initial KloutoCalypse: how big is it?

In my last post I showed how to remove your Klout profile from the public eye, without waiting for Klout to take 24-48 hours to do so. As I get impatient every now and then, I decided to take the first 500 tweets containing Klout and delete after I published it. I ignored all the tweets that said something like "Gee I wish I could delete my Klout profile" and only kept those that showed knowledge of being able to delete their Klout account with a few simple clicks.

Out of the 500 tweets, 337 remained. I filtered those for unique users, and stuck to 293 (sorry, said 296 before) unique Twitter users who knew how to delete their Klout profile.
For every single one of those, I checked their Klout profile to see if it still existed.

Completely drop your Klout account in 30 seconds

Well, the day has finally come. Since today, Klout allows you to delete the profile they (or you) created on you.
In my case, that means I'll first have to sign up for klout, as they created my account all by themselves - but I'm happy to go through that little PITA

Here's how to delete your account:

My first anniversary

Today, it's been exactly one year since I became self-employed.
I've loved almost every second of it - while the start was hard, the middle and end were absolutely great

The market is still going up and down so I've had quite a few days without paid work, but used those to work on my business, network, future clients and assignments, and the apps and websites I'm working on

After one year, I've made a few times what I used to earn so the future looks bright. I treated our family to our most expensive vacation ever as successes have got to be celebrated, and conveniently that concluded my first year

Why I'm using fake identities to sign up

That is, from now on I will. It is not only getting harder to sign up, it is also getting harder to sign in, and out. Let me explain please as this story has a few sides to it.
But first, let me make my point: I'm going to use fake identities to sign up for new services. If I like the new service, I'll abandon the fake identity and sign up with a real one

Will that mean I'll be lying when accepting most ToS?

Telotecture - architecture's complement

Architecture - as I took 4 years of Greek it's always meant the same word to me: that what stands at the beginning of construction, "ἀρχι-τέκτων". Tekton is a builder / carpenter, and I was sure there was a verb tektein, but after looking for hours I'm afraid that this is it. At least arche doesn't mean leader, it's the Greek word for beginning - so don't get fooled by online etymology sites or even wikipedia

Anyway.
Now, I'm not so sure. An architect used to be a sort of foreman overseeing and instructing the builders as well. Comparing that to IT, I think we've had almost 2 decades now of Architecture that were moderately successful.
Moderately, because initially a lot of people floated their way up into the architectural layer due to a lack of weight. Now we have various certifications, of which TOGAF is a reasonably good one, and quality has significantly increased - but there are other issues now

One of them is the decreased size of projects, and the increased distance between the Architect and the Workers - and you know what happens when the cat's away.

Public chats on Twitter - invading your timeline?

After a conversation with Alan Berkson, I wondered about the public chats on Twitter. They're conducted by following / naming a hashtag, which usually happens at conferences, but there are also various chats going on such as #lrnchat, #influencechat

How do you chat on Twitter? That is the question. And it is a difficult one, or rather, the answers are various. There is no general recipient for a chat except a hashtag maybe, but that is visible for all others to see. So everything you say, goes down your timeline and is to be absorbed by your followers

Did Apple finally get hitched?

[Image by Roberta F.]

Thanks to Peter Hicks for inspiring me for this title

Lately I've noticed quite a few complaints regarding the upgrade to Apple's iOS5. A few examples of that: the upgrade itself failing to complete, having to restore factory settings and lose all apps and files, battery draining like mad, Twitter failing until after complete deinstall and reinstall of Twitter, all iTunes lost, all images lost, being unable to SMS, and many, many more complaints when you search for "ios5 fail" on Twitter

Coincidentally, this the first time I've heard fanbois complain about their Precious. And no, relating that to the passing of Steve jobs wouldn't be funny

Open Source and Cloud, Mobile, Data: what goes where?

After an interesting question from Matt Asay I gave a few answers, then decided that Twitter's not always suited for long conversations (ahem)

I'm working on the theme for OSBC2012. I want to highlight the connection btwn cloud/mobile/data. Can someone help me express that?

My first reaction was that these words are big, and could mean a lot of different things to different people. I don't like to talk about Cloud as it's a blanket term for three different main streams in general: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (infra, operating system and software).
Mobile? Pretty much the same thing. Mobile has operating systems and software, and is useless without that special infrastructure called Connectivity: a connection to the Web

B2B and Social - selling ice-cream in the desert?

Lately I see a lot of "news" on B2B from a place I wouldn't expect: Social.
In my opinion Social and B2B have absolutely no business with each other (see my freeBook on Social Business)

Joshua Paul is my superhero of the day here, with an utter nonsense post titled 10 Secrets of the B2B Social Business Superhero

Cloud API's don't exist, but become costlier over time

I had a discussion with George Reese on Cloud and API's, starting with me saying I'd support a maximum of 3 different API versions, and off went the discussion.
His "Max 3 versions? Do you hate your ecosystem?", "What do you mean there's no such thing as a public cloud API?" and "When you cease to support a version of your API, you kill your ecosystem." were puzzling, and he ended with "The bottom line is this: If you decide to change your API, who should bear the costs of that change? You or your ecosystem?"

Let me try to explain here what Cloud is, what API's are, and what cost is

The project versus product dilemma in Enterprise IT

[Image via Dave Spicer]

I've often run into the project-product dilemma over the last decades: a company does business by supplying products and services, which -after it's reached a certain size- can only be implemented with the help of IT. Over time, that "help" turns into "sole reliance on"

Strangely enough, these IT-implementations are project-driven, and have increasingly become so over the years. Scrum, Agile, XP: all software-developments methods of the last decade are single-mindedly focused on how to do a project faster

When the project's completed, the product is deemed to have been delivered and the project team is dismantled, with maintenance and support (to be) handed over to the standing organisation - so the business product gets delivered by an IT project, and then what?

Intrinsic motivation - doesn't work well in enterprises 2/2

After my previous post on intrinsic motivation, trashing the single study / research underlying Dan Pink's speech, I had awkward responses. For some reason, people had a very hard time reading and understanding the post, where I clearly stated the scope in the very beginning: focusing entirely on the single so-called research underlying it.
Most dragged in other research (hah! the irony of that) or spoke about their own experiences and some even slapped me around the ears with books.
I told all that I wasn't prepared to listen to that unless they gave me a motivated point of view on my post, its content and my conclusion. Alas, only one came close but managed to get sidetracked within one single tweet. So I rest my case: the 2005 Federal Reserve Bank "Large Stakes, Big Mistakes" Ariely study was fraudulent, and only meant to prove its hypothesis. And no one cares about that

Anyway, now onto the second part: my own opinions on and experiences with extrinsic and intrinsic motivation

The myth of standardisation

[Image by  Someregger]

After reading the ERP paradox by Kailash Awati, I had that "Oh yes" feeling of recognition: someone was hitting the nail right on the head here.
Standardisation is a myth, especially when you go global. There are two simple reasons for that: customer demand and business supply

Ask a CEO what makes his business so special, and he'll start with "We distinguish ourselves from our competitors by..." and there you have it; let me translate that for you: "We do the exact same business as half the globe, but support more exceptions to the rules"

Intrinsic motivation - I doubt the research 1/2

Deb Louison Lavoy shared a TED talk with me, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Briefly summarising that, Dan shows proof of extrinsic motivation (pure money in this case) actually having little to none and sometimes even a negative effect on people's performance. In short, when the reward for a task was at its highest, people did actually perform worse than when it was a medium reward: in the experiment conducted there were three kinds of rewards: low, medium and high

I want to write two posts on this. This one is about me hairsplitting the very research in question that underlies Dan's passionate and entertaining TED talk. The second one will be about my opinion on intrinsic (and of course, extrinsic as well) motivation

Update 19th September 15:05 CET: I exchanged some tweets yesterday with some people about this post, and the outcome baffled me: people attacked me about intrinsic motivation in general, pointing me to research even (how ironic), and I even got called jerk and idiot.
Please read the above carefully before you react. I also changed this post and added one line below in which I clearly state that good performance in this test would entitle a participant to the equivalent of one month's worth of salary - for half a day's work. Performing very well would "only" double that. Would any performance below good be rewarded? No, not at all. So only good or very good performance would be rewarded. Well, I think it suffices to say that merely performing good - according to the research team - would be considered to be outrageously well rewarded by any participant. I'd sure as hell make sure that I perform just good, so there's hardly any incentive to perform very well
Hence why I consider this very research to be fraudulent and urge it to be completely ignored from a scientific point of view; and that's the only focal point of this post

The research paper can be found here - I'm referring to Experiment I only

Should I stay or should I go? At 40

Reblogged from Rajesh Shetty's "Why many smart people hit a plateau (and stay there)"

The magic number is 40.

Yes, it is at the age of forty that many smart people realize that they are stuck. I am not saying that smart people don’t get stuck some other time but 40 is the age where I have heard about “getting stuck” a lot more than other ages.

I first wrote about this in my book “Beyond Code” (foreword by my hero Tom Peters, free download) but it’s worth revisiting again.

Here is what I think happens. The first 10-15 years of working life seems like progress for most people although what is typically happening is general upward adjustment of salary that marketplace offers to pretty much anyone that is doing reasonably well. Exceptional people are getting a premium even during that period but the delta between exceptional people and good performers are not big enough to catch anybody’s attention.

The second coming of 9/11

Over the past weeks I've watched the growing attention for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in every media possible, including so-called conspiracy theories. What strikes me most is that a majority of the attention is on the events itself, and very little on what to learn from them.
Since 9/11, the US government (agencies) have gotten an increased grip on privacy - not only in the US, but all over the world. Taking a flight has become a silly drag, where I for one sometimes don't have to take off my shoes while going through Customs, and sometimes I do.
Just one example, yet I could go on and on...

It doesn't matter whether I think (or rather, believe) 9/11 was an inside job or not, or whether measures taken since are proportionate or outrageous or anything in between. What does matter is the fact that the "War on Terror" has an eery resemblance to the Crusades

How to queue - that is the question

The other day my attention got drawn by a very large national company that claimed to have a performance problem: sometimes it would take ages for messages to reach their destination, and entire applications would come to a screeching halt.
After a few questions and answers, it was clear that they didn't have a performance problem: they had an architectural problem or, in a nutshell, a very unfortunate design

Queueing has become a much-appreciated message-transport system in the last decades.

Selling licenses to bureaucracies is embarrasingly easy

This is a fictitious post. It's all based on nothing, if any, maybe my dreams or nightmares or who knows what. This isn't real - it's just a dream. Somehow my memory got enriched with this information, and whether it actually did or did not happen, I really can't tell.
Anyway, it's such a bizarre story that I want to share it with you. Here goes

Innovation - today's Golden Calf

This week I had a conversation about Innovation and IBM. Vijay Vijayasankar wrote a follow-up post on that as he was forced to "leave early" - this is my reply to that. I think the three of us usually agree pretty much on pretty much everything. And this was an awkward one really

Klout's True Reach? Simply your follower count

In yesterday's post I busied myself with new ways of looking at Twitter statistics. Today I was suggested to compare them to Klout scores. I did, and I found out that their True Reach - that vast, impressive number that you probably look up to - is nothing more than a simple mathematical equation

Twitter stats redefined - now measuring true influence?

I had a small revelation the other day while on Twitter and chatting with Alan Berkson. As you may or may not known, I'm a self-proclaimed statishist, meaning that I really get excited by statistics, or stats for short

I did a few calculations on 20 Twitter people, taking their latest 1,000 followers, and looking at their followers' followers and "friends"

Does Google get enterprise? No - so what?

After a small conversation with Frank Scavo - whom I hold highly - it struck me: we old enterprise boys that keep kicking the #socmed chins might be on our way to retirement. Not saying that Frank's one of them, but I certainly count myself to the pack as I've only been around multinationals and global companies for the past 15 years. I've never consulted a national company - save governmental agencies - let alone SMB or even smaller

Don't we already share one world religion?

A Dutch tweep uttered the next wish today:

Ik geloof in één religie, die alle mensen met elkaar verbindt, en waarin ieder met zijn eigen visie de antwoorden op zijn vragen vindt.

which translates to: "I believe in one religion, that connects all people, and in which everyone finds the answers to his questions driven by his own vision"

Well, that religion is already here, isn't it?

Social silos adding to enterprise silos? Not with proper Integration

Laurie Buzcek called out for Integration as a solution for the failure of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business - which she equates to each other - and I couldn't help but think of Tibbr when reading her post
Dion Hinchcliffe responded with a post in which he also stresses the integration of social media with enterprise tools, albeit he's careful to stress that pure technology can't be the answer - apparently we're really beyond E2.0 now

Dion claims OpenSocial 2.0 is the answer but I fail to see how that will help us further: although an impressive amount of work, it is purely technical and relying on the fact that

Developers can create applications, using standard JavaScript and HTML, that run on social websites that have implemented the OpenSocial APIs

and I don't see that happen any time soon - the only successful 2.0 Social Tools are those that are 1.0 in nature: confined

Another Infographic bites the dust

Mindflash produced another Infographic, subtitled "Are companies allowing employees to use social media in the workplace?"
That title couldn't be more misleading. Yet another time it's proven that content and presentation hardly ever go along

Get into and out of your comfort zone

I had a small conversation today with Jen Olney, about her tweet

It's amazing what happens when you connect with those who align with your values - sparks fly and success is yours!

I agreed, but chose to disagree. Yes it's true, been there done that, and I understand the angle to this: coming out of the dark and finding "like-minded" that prove that you're not a raving lunatic after all, gives a great sense of relief.
However, I see another angle

Social CRM. Good riddance. Next: Social ERP?

Paul Greenberg, dubbed by some "the godfather of SCRM" wrote a post on ZDNET about Gartner's 2011 SCRM Magic Quadrant. Paul is not pleased with the 2011 SCRM MQ, and he wasn't with the 2010 either.
I'm with Paul on all his points against Gartner's selection and evaluation process, yet against him on berating Gartner. Although I don't think very highly of Gartner, if they fail to understand your love child, you just didn't do your homework very well

What am I going to condone it for?

Yesterday evening, the BBC announced an interview with Darcus Howe,

to discuss if comparisons between these inner city riots and events that took place in the 1980s are useful or misleading

This morning, that interview took place - and bit the BBC in the ass (pardon my French)

The SI is dead. Long live the Supplier Integrator

Have we reached peak SI is a splendid post by Peter Evans Greenwood about the changing IT world.
On one side of the boxing ring there is the traditional system integrator, on the other side there is a multitude of change agents:

• Business taking back budget for IT spend from local IT
• On-demand and on-time (i.e. small) projects rather than "strategic" million-dollar ones
• SaaS for a quick proof of concept over old-fashioned PoCs
• Standardisation over customisation (what I call "Shop and Stop")
• Consumerism outperforming enterprise shop offering
• Overall decimation of the traditional SI Time & Material model

Enterprise Architecture: it's like measuring the coastline

[Capgemini's Integrated Architectural Framework]

I've made the mistake once again: underestimating an enterprise's business and process flow while looking at it from a conceptual or logical point of view, before hitting what we call the physical layer. Call me an idiot please, yes you can

Let me use a few metaphors and make this an easy one to understand. I'll follow the model above

Guilty until proven innocent - we find ourselves

Following up on yesterday's post, somehwere around Kindergarten we're either perfectly happy and in loving peace with everyone and everything around us, or much less so.
When much less so, there must be a reason, or, as I said yesterday, a root cause. When we know the cause, we can find the cure - problem solved!

Not

As an energy of fact, you're matter

Matter. Energy. Yin and Yang.
Here's my story on why we tick the way we do - part one

The socmed files: I wanna believe

This week I had a chat with Steve Denning and Michael Ricard, and also some comments on IBM presenting their social profile.
Both are related in the sense that lots of (social) promises are made, but little social or not outcomes presented.
That worries me. Social works for me, for sure, and for many others I know. But why? Is it the What -just get yourself on the social bandwagon and you'll be saved- or the How -adapt to the social media ways of living and you'll enter the Promised Land- or the With What -connect via as many social networks as you can and you'll be Socialised

For me, this is how it works:

Google extremely favours G+ in search

I'm not a very vain man, if at all, but every now and then I Google for "martijn linssen" to see what comes up. I only check the first page, and see how the order is for the first five: those should contain this blog (number one), my Twitter account and my LinkedIn account.
Currently LinkedIn is at no. 2 and Twitter at 3 (I have no idea why!) and numbers 6-10 show the other Martijn Linssen, who is on Facebook unlike me, and whatever comes up next

Rome and Greece. History repeating itself, or reverting?

2,500 years ago, Rome and Greece were formed.In 509 BC the Roman Republic was formed, and the Classical period started in Greece around 500 BC. 500 years later Greece was put under Roman rule, and 500 years after that the Germanics forced the last Roman emperor to abdicate

But, in the meantime, Rome's and Greece's influence had stretched across the world.
Looking at the current state of affairs, the so-called senatorial provinces are rocking the boat again. Will history revert itself, and their rise mean the downfall of Europe?

Twitter spam - a problem? No. Curation is here

A few times a day, I get a tweet directed at me from someone I don't know, who neither offers something related to what I have recently tweeted.
The first few times that happened, a few months ago, I clicked the URL and ended up at some site after being redirected via more than a few others (hello pageview counter), and saw nothing I was interested in

Since, I recognise the pattern: tweet is short and unrelatable, picture is attractive in either which way, and tweet always contains a URL. When I visit that tweeps' tweets, out of the last 20 a few are repeated

Pattern established - why now can't Twitter do that automatically and block these spammers before they harass me?