On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post

In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets.
An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some "thought-leaders" use it to ditch all attribution and pretend the tweet originated from themselves. Usually, their Twitter bio then also says "I tweet interesting links" - well, now you know how they do it and how original and carefully curated these are...

I wondered about the current state of affairs - and did a deep analysis this time, the results of which are depicted above

GoDaddy... Go... Gone

Tonight the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS - a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It's a simple attack, and very effective. It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the middle of the classroom and getting all those toddler questions fired off at him. The inevitable result: he breaks down

Resource identification is not a REST invention

An article on programmable web - pointed out to me by Fred Verheul (thanks Fred!) - gave me an adrenaline rush.
It was so full of bollox that I almost started to hyperventilate - which is a pun on the abundant use of the word hypermedia in that same post

Let me just quote one part of the post:

This subtle shift in the source of application control information makes it possible for the same client code to recognize and execute new features as they appear over time without the need for patches or downloads

The post contains more nonsense like this. Let me quote yet another brilliant piece, and be done with quoting:

The long tail of IT: the Indian connection

This is a theoretical post lacking research and analysis - for that, I'll have to take a few days and I'll follow up in my next post.
However, I have this idea in my head and usually, that leads to something good and insightful. So please bear with me while I set out my thoughts on the Indian connection.
I've worked for a system integrator for well over a decade - I've also analysed system integrators for almost a decade. As such, I've been sandwiched between internal figures, and outside figures, and wondered where the ever deepening gap disappeared into

My thesis: system integrators (SI) are a dying breed, yet that doesn't show so much (if any) because of the fact that they hire Indians by the sackfull

No Custom Code, No Customization, No Requirements. And No Integration

The title comes from a conversation between Ron Tolido and me in which we perused the joys and challenges of SaaS. Ron has a very sharp mind and an even sharper tongue, although he somehow magically manages to give people the idea of adressing them in their comfort zone - I never said I was done learning

Ron still works for Capgemini although he's not the lipservice-paying kind of guy, I freely float in space. I'll jot down my thoughts on what SaaS means to the world - read: IT vendors and system integrators - and of course am very interested to see what he has to say about the same

Hybrid mobile apps will conquer the mobile enterprise

[Image by HLundgaard]

There is a difference about how we thinks things will evolve, and how they do. I've been wondering about Mobile and app stores for a while - they seem contradictionairy.
Mobile has taken such a great flight because of lowered cost and increased availability of Internet for mobile, the old-fashioned telephone has turned into a smartphone with the power of a desktop

So, with all this ubiquitous Internet around, what is the next hootest thing for Mobile? App stores, where you can download applications onto your mobile! Isn't that odd; why not browse to an app in the cloud?

Brian Katz wrote a great post on this, and I'll to it here

REST definition and its place within Enterprise Integration

In a previous post I explained why REST is useless when it comes to Enterprise Integration. Even though at the very beginning I explicitly stated that

Roy Fielding wrote his dissertation entirely in the context of Web

and that

REST has absolutely no business benefits whatsoever with regards to Enterprise Integration

I got surprised to say the least by comments in various channels, most from professionals, even vendor representatives. Tech people, but nonetheless

Avoid dashes and fancy quotes in blog titles

John Reed pointed me to a post by Jeremiah Owyang, which I failed to retrieve on my phone:

Coping With Twitter’s Unfollow Bug bit.ly/H6rUUz - by @jowyang (via @jonerp) #ensw
— Jon Reed (@jonerpnewsfeed) maart 31, 2012

Ironic as it may seem, this is due to another bug which doesn't have clear ownership: let's call it the character translation bug (sorry non-IT folks)

Apple margin per device - expressed in Chinese

[Image by Sven Teschke]

An article in the New York Times published 2 days ago suddenly gained a lot of traction and got discussed, reposted and reblogged today: Apple making money off of the United States, while directly employing "only" twice as many employees in the US than overseas - but indirectly more than ten times those combined, none of which in the US

I've published on Apple's revenue and profit a few times now, last of which was two months ago. A historical year for Apple: it surpassed Google on profit per employee - operating profit so before taxes, by the way

Airline ticket pricing: ticket prices compared

After yesterday's post, some wanted to know "the best" flights / airline, regardless of surcharge(s). Fair enough, that probably means the cheapest ones, so I dove in again and came up with the following data (I calculated my own surcharge based on the experience I now have, so prices will differ from what you can find yourself)

(Like yesterday, I took a round-trip from New York to Amsterdam and back, leaving 21st of March and returning 4th of April. I compared both Economy as Business)

Airline ticket pricing: surcharges compared

Lots of regulations and restrictions have been enforced in Europe, and some other parts of the world, to "keep airplane tickets transparent".
You must know from your own situation or someone else's how that too-good-to-be-true 200 dollar one-week trip to the sun turned out to be 550 after all extra charges (that applied to your particular situation of course!) got slapped on, only to find out that airport bagage rules and local customs had to get their share of the pie too. Oh well, so it cost 700 dollars in stead, but it sure was fun, wasn't it?

Damn right it was - for them

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

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

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

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

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"

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)

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?