Tag Archives: Twitter

2014

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Reflecting on 2014, a couple of themes:

  • Reclaim. In the past, I’ve written about taking back technologies from corporate entities. This year, I’ve found myself embarking on what I consider to be the natural extension of Project Reclaim: taking back my attention from technologies. In April I ditched my smartphone, and in September I stopped using Twitter. Each decision arose from a desire to devote more of my limited mental and emotional energies on things that matter most to me, like my family and my work. In each case, the pull of inertia was strong – the natural thing was to continue using the tools, just like everyone else around me was doing – but in each case, the rewards of letting go have been significant.
  • Ease. My wife and I decided over dinner tonight that 2014 felt easy. We didn’t move this year. We enjoyed satisfying jobs and financial stability. Our son transitioned from a toddler to a very nice little boy. In contrast, our family has a number of very large changes coming in 2015, changes that will be hard in many ways. So the relative and welcome easiness of 2014 is worth a moment’s pause.
  • Shipping. During 2014, BuddyPress shipped a number of major versions. I put a huge amount of time into BP 2.0, as both a developer and a release manager, and I think it paid off – IMHO it’s one of the most important releases in BuddyPress history. BuddyPress 2.2 will come in the first weeks of 2015, and it too promises to be a really important release. In addition, I was invited to join the WordPress core team for the 4.1 release, an experience that’s been fulfilling in its own way. Considered alongside a number of successful client project launches, I’ve been involved in a happily large number of solid software releases this year.

A big year ahead, but for now, за ваше здоровье!

Goodbye to Twitter

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I’ve been a pretty heavy Twitter user since about 2009. I’ve had a lot of fun using the service, I’ve forged a number of friendships there, and in several concrete ways, I owe my career to my use of Twitter. For years, I’ve kept TweetDeck open on a dedicated screen throughout my working day – a connection to the world around me, to colleagues and friends around the world. I was a Twitter advocate. I loved Twitter.

Over the past year or so, the things I once liked about being on Twitter have faded pretty rapidly, and the downsides of being connected to this space have come to overwhelm the upsides. Since ditching my smartphone a few months ago, I’ve been using Twitter less and less, until about a week ago I pretty much stopped.

There are dozens of reasons why I just don’t want to participate anymore, some of which are part of the recent zeitgeist and some of which are totally specific to me. It’d be pointless to list them all. At the same time, transitioning away from being an active Twitter user feels like a major life event for me (silly as that may sound), and I can’t help but reflect on two interconnected reasons that stand out from the rest.

One is that I’m tired of having an audience, or at least tired of having the specific audience that I’ve got on Twitter. Interacting earnestly and honestly with others is hard to do when you’re being watched by thousands of strangers. Some people react to this by adopting the voice of a pundit or a “public intellectual”; I’ve chosen to tell jokes. And the truth is that I like to tell jokes, and it’s nice to make a funny and have people laugh. But when your main public outlet is primarily a platform for snarky comments, it starts warping the way you interact with the world. I find myself actively looking for funny ways to be annoyed as part of my everyday life, and I shape a lot of my internal monologue regarding the banalities of existence against the backdrop of the audience I’ve cultivated. One-liner oneupsmanship is fun when you’re at the bar with buddies. But when it pervades your waking hours, it feels so vapid, and I’m tired of it.

Closely related is the sheer exhaustion of being constantly tapped into in the network. Every tweet I read or write elicits some small (or not so small) emotional reaction: anger, mirth, puzzlement, guilt, anxiety, frustration. I’ve tried to prune my following list so that when I do find myself engaging in a genuine way, it’s with a person I genuinely want to engage with. But there’s a limit to how much pruning can be done, when unfollowing a real-life friend is the online equivalent of punting his puppy across the room. So all day long, I’m in and out of the stream, always reacting to whatever’s coming next. Setting aside the question of how distracting this is when I’m trying to get work done, the fact is that I have a limited capacity for emotional engagement, and the code-switching that’s required when the character of my response is supposed to change every 140 characters only increases this overhead. A life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions. I want to be pouring these energies into my family and my friends and my work.

I’ll keep my Twitter account, and I’ll probably open it once or twice a day to see if anything catches my eye. But I no longer want its constant companionship. That this realization feels more liberating than bittersweet shows that it’s probably the right decision for me.

Recommendations for per-project time tracking tools

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I don’t bill by the hour very much anymore, but I still like to keep rough track of time spent on individual client projects, for my own purposes. I currently use a simple spreadsheet, with tabs for each project/client. Yesterday I asked on Twitter what tools people were using for this purpose:

Here are some responses I got. I can’t personally endorse anything on this list, but it might be a helpful starting point for others.

Bebop is totally rocksteady

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File this under “WPedu is killing it right now”.

The team at the Centre for Educational Research and Development at University of Lincoln (UK) has just announced the first public release of Bebop, their new BuddyPress plugin. Read more about the release and about Bebop itself. (Disclaimer – I have done some consultation for the Bebop project, though I’m writing this blog post outside of that consultant role.)

I find Bebop compelling because of what it does, and also because of how it was built. In a nutshell, Bebop is an aggregator for Open Educational Resources, or OERs. ‘OER’ is a term of art among open education folks, referring to learning resources that are available for free use, under an open license. (See OER Commons for a longer definition.) In practice, this can mean anything from videos to lesson plans to games to websites. Bebop is designed to allow members of a BuddyPress community to collect their own OERs from various web services – Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc – for display on their BP profiles. It’s a nice demonstration of how BuddyPress can be used as a tool for aggregating work done elsewhere on the web. It also demonstrates another way in which universities can use a free platform like BuddyPress as a non-commercial, locally hosted home for students and faculty, while recognizing that valuable work happens in spaces not under the university’s control. And from a technical point of view, I like how Bebop uses BP’s Activity component and profile metaphors to creative ends.

Bebop was built as part of a “rapid innovation” project. To put the term “rapid” in context: In the context of universities, projects usually move forward glacially. Getting approval and funding may itself take years, and by the time development begins, the original idea/technology is already obsolete. Bebop, in contrast, was conceived and developed over just a couple of months. It’s great to see these kinds of (relatively) rapid projects happening in universities – they can demonstrate to funders the benefits that come along with a bit of agility and risk and freedom.

If you’re running a BuddyPress installation in a university, you might consider taking Bebop for a spin. Get it from the wordpress.org plugin repo or follow development at Github.

Project Reclaim update

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Back in March 2011, I kicked off the Project Reclaim project. Since then, others have picked up where I’ve left off – most notably, Doug Belshaw and D’Arcy Norman (who have surpassed me both in the reclaiming and in the blogging about the reclaiming). Behind my radio silence, though, has been a flurry of recent reclaiming activity:

  • I’m mostly de-Mac-ified. I recently bought a Samsung Series 9, which is serving as a stopgap full-time machine until I have the time to set up a desktop Linux rig. On day one, I wiped the Windows 7 installation and installed Arch Linux. It took some time to get set up, and I’m still using my Mac for a couple of things (Picasa, Skype, the old Adobe AIR Tweetdeck), but I’m almost totally moved over. I may write a post or two in the upcoming weeks about specific parts of the transition – there were some pain points, to be sure, especially in the initial setup. But, in general, it’s been smoother, easier, and more pleasurable than I would have guessed. Using Linux full time makes me feel like I’m back in the driver’s seat of my computing life, and it feels extra good to know that 95% of the software on my full-time machine is non-proprietary.
  • At the same time that I moved to Linux, I also switched to Vim. I’d been a user of BBEdit, which is a really great piece of software, but moving away from the Mac meant I had to choose something else. So I figured I’d go for the powerhouse of all text editors. Vim has a certain allure. When I was younger, I studied jazz piano. I remember watching my instructor play and being driven nearly to tears: I understood, in broad strokes, what he was doing and why it sounded the way it did, but it crushed me that I couldn’t translate that knowledge into the same kind of performance magic that he could. I feel much the same way about Vim masters. I’m far from a master, but I’m getting much much more fluent. Also, of course, Vim is non-proprietary, and it gives me major geek cred. So, big win all around. I should note that the Vim transition has actually been far more difficult than the Linux transition, and it was only after about four or five weeks of full-time use that I started to feel like I was back to my pre-switch level of productivity. (In this sense, it was a lot like switching from QWERTY to Dvorak.)

The big proprietary services and software products left in my life are Dropbox and Twitter. Moving away from Dropbox is fairly simple – see D’Arcy’s great posts on his experiments with Owncloud – I’ve just been lazy about it. Twitter is far more complicated, both technically and socially, as well as far more pressing, given Twitter’s recent NBCishness. So that’s the next mountain to climb.

How many others have been Reclaiming over the last year or two? Would love to see more projects along the lines of D’Arcy’s and Doug’s.

BuddyPress and the YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about reclaiming short URLs using YOURLS. That post raised some interest among the CUNY Academic Commons team in having a URL shortener just for the Commons, with full integration into BuddyPress. So I emailed Ozh Richard, author of YOURLS, about the possibility of adding BuddyPress support to his official YOURLS WordPress plugin, YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter. He graciously accepted my offer to do the leg work.

Today I’m releasing the fruits of this collaboration: version 1.5 of YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter. YWTT 1.5 automatically detects when you’re running BuddyPress, and adds the following BP-specific features:

  • Member and Group URLs – Generate short URLs for member profiles and for group home pages.
  • A “pretty URL” setting – Instead of generating random URLs (like http://blo.so/54), you can make member and/or group members ‘pretty’ (like http://blo.so/username or http://blo.so/groupname).
  • User customizability – Optionally, you can add new options under groups’ Admin > Group Settings and members’ Settings > Short URL allowing users to request a custom short URL of their choice. (This feature requires that you set YOURLS_UNIQUE_URLS to false in your YOURLS configuration file.)

Down the road, I plan to flesh out BP-YOURLS functionality, with optional short URLs for forum topics, activity items, and so on.

I’ve also slipped full localization support into version 1.5. Send me your mo/po translation files if you’d like them to be distributed with the plugin.

Download YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter 1.5, with BP support.

Shorten your own dang URLs

In my last Project Reclaim post, I talked about using WordPress as a Twitpic-like personal mobile photo service. When the ultimate goal of the photoblog is to send a tweet, it’s almost always necessary to use a URL shortener. But trusting your URL shortening to a free service is a dangerous move. If that service goes out of business, or if they decide to take down the database for some reason or other, the links in those tweets will break. (This problem is delightfully called “linkrot”.)

So, while URL shorteners are sometimes necessary, they’re also an obvious instance for reclaiming your data. Moving to your own URL shortener means that you control the domain, you control the content, you can back up the database however you’d like, etc.

I went with a piece of software called YOURLS. It’s written by Ozh Richard, a WordPress developer, and there’s a slick WP plugin that makes it a great choice for use with my WP photoblog. Here’s a short walkthrough of how I set it up.

Setup

  • Get a domain. Something short is nice, obviously. I just started typing two- and three-letter domains into my domain registrar’s search box (I use Dynadot), which showed me the top-level domains available, until I found one that was easy to look at and remember (http://blo.so). Make sure you do whatever setup your registrar requires to get the domain working – probably as simple as setting the nameservers to your host’s NS addresses.
  • Install YOURLS. The instructions provided at the YOURLS site are pretty concise, but here’s the gist: upload the software to the server, create a new database, copy the sample configuration file to user/config.php, and fill in the configuration file with the proper database info, etc. You can get more YOURLS config info here.
  • Configure an Apache virtual host, if necessary. If your hosting provider doesn’t have cPanel or some other tool that easily lets you point your new short domain to a subdirectory, you’ll need to do it manually by creating a new Apache virtual host file and activating that site. This website has a pretty good explanation. But essentially, just copy the default configuration in sites-available (likely at /etc/apache2/sites-available) and change the info in the VirtualHost section.
  • Install the WordPress plugin. The YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin is easy to install and set up. Once the plugin’s installed, go to Dashboard > Settings > YOURLS and fill in the necessary information. Setting up the Twitter bit is a pain, thanks to Twitter’s requirement that you get a developer’s key, but it’s easy to do. Just follow the on-screen instructions.

At this point, everything should be set up. Send a test post or two to try it out.

Bonus! Use me with Tweetdeck

YOURLS has a REST API that can be used with a bunch of applications. For instance, I’ve configured my TweetDeck installation to do its URL auto-shortening with blo.so. Go to Settings > Services and choose Other from the URL shortener dropdown. Your endpoint will look something like http://blo.so/yourls-api.php?signature=XXXXXXX&action=shorturl&url=%@&format=simple. You’ll have to replace blo.so with your own URL, of course, and the XXXXXXX signature with a custom YOURLS signature password. You can get it from the YOURLS admin screen (http://example.com/admin/tools.php > Secure passwordless API call)

Here’s the great thing. There’s no reason why a couple people can’t share a single YOURLS installation. In fact, I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and start my own URL shortening co-op. I’ll give usernames/passwords to blo.so to the first couple friends who want in. Send an email to boonebgorges at gmail if (1) you are my friend, (2) you want in on blo.so, and (3) you promise to actually use it and break the bit.ly/tinyurl habit.

Kicking the Twitpic habit with WordPress

Twitpic and its ilk are pretty convenient, especially when they’re integrated into mobile Twitter apps. But as recent articles have shown, the terms of service of such services can be downright icky. Twitpic may have changed its tune a few days after the outcry, but honestly, if it takes an outcry to make a company not be evil, then maybe you shouldn’t be dealing with that company.

This is a perfect little side project for Project Reclaim, and something of a no-brainer. Twitpic etc are stripped-down publishing platforms. I already run a couple installations of a non-stripped-down publishing platform, namely WordPress. So I set up my own photo blog in just a couple of minutes.

I already have an instance of WordPress Multisite that I use for a bunch of different purposes. So setting up the blog itself was easy – I went to my Network Admin panel and clicked Add Site. If you’ve never worked with WordPress Multisite before, you should know that it’s already built into the WordPress installation that you may already have. You can read more about how to turn on Multisite at the WordPress Codex, or you can watch a somewhat out-of-date but otherwise charming video of a handsome and engaging speaker talking on this very subject.

Then I found a theme that looks nice with photographs. I didn’t look very far. My favorite visual theme has, for some time, been Allan Cole’s AutoFocus. In the future, I’ll probably build a child theme that has a few tweaks appropriate for my mobile photo blog, but it works pretty nicely out of the box.

Then I fired up my WordPress Android app (there’s one for the iPhone too) and connected it to my new WordPress blog. (You’ll have to enable XML-RPC on your WP blog if you want to use the mobile app.) I tweaked a few of the blog setting in my app, so that the photo would be linked after I published it, and the thumbnails would be of an appropriate size.

Finally, I got a WordPress plugin that sends tweets every time a post is published on the photo blog. I’m using YOURLS (more on this in an upcoming Project Reclaim post), but there are lots of them out there that are freely available. Just search the WordPress plugin repository.

Now, when I want to tweet a picture, here’s what I do. Open the WP app. Create a new post. Click the Media button. Take the photo. Add the content of my tweet in the Title field. Publish. (Don’t have to do it in this order, of course.) Totally painless – and I don’t have to worry about any terms of service. Yippee!

For more reading, here’s another blog post about the very same idea.

Project Reclaim

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Update: I have begun aggregating these posts at projectreclaim.net.

Lately I have been feeling increasingly uneasy about the state of my digital affairs. I am a leader on a number of open source software projects that pride themselves on, among other things, their ability to enable users to “own their own data”. Moreover, I am trained as a philosopher, and have spent a pretty fair amount of time reading and thinking carefully about the nature of data and our relationships with it. If anyone is in a position to develop and advocate for good models of digital independence, I am.

Yet, when I look around my digital world, I see instance after instance where I am, to a greater or lesser extent, completely reliant on the good will of commercial entities and their propietary systems. To wit:

  • My Twitter account is a big part of my online identity
  • The last five years of my private correspondence, personal and professional, is in Gmail
  • I use Dropbox for syncing documents between devices (like my blog_sandbox.txt file, where I’m writing this post!)
  • I use Picasa Web Albums to back up and share photos
  • I have a Mozy account to back up the rest of my important files
  • Until recently, I had an iPhone. I still use a Mac
  • I use Remember The Milk for task management
  • I store source code for all my projects in Github

Some of these are products; some are services. Some are free; some of them I pay for. And – for sure – some of the companies behind the products and services listed above are more evil than others. So I don’t want to pretend that my reliance on each of them is equally bad. But each item on this list plays a crucial role in my digital life, and each one of them operates in a way that is beyond my control, both literally (I can’t modify the source code) and more figuratively (questions about ownership, exportability, transportability are icky).

I’m planning to extricate myself.

Project Reclaim

In order to make it sound a bit fancier, I’m giving my project a name: Project Reclaim. ‘Reclaim’ because it’s a manifestation of my desire to fight the inertia that leads us to give up control over our computing experiences, my desire to reclaim control and ownership. ‘Project’ because this will be hard, and ongoing. And why give it a name at all? I’m hoping that, by being public about it – putting my experiences in a series of blog posts and tweets under a common tag – that I’ll be able to hold myself accountable, and hopefully guide others who are hoping to reclaim their lives a bit as well.

In short, Project Reclaim is the process of weaning oneself off of digital platforms that are closed source and/or under the control of others.

Methodology

How will Project Reclaim actually work?

  1. Assess the situation I’ll first need a way of figuring out which systems and platforms are worth moving away from, what their replacements should be, and in what order I should effect the transition. I’ve got a few rules of thumb.
    • Open source is better than closed source. I write open-source software for a living. I believe that, on balance, it makes better software. And I believe that using software where one has access to the source code is a necessary component of maximizing one’s digital autonomy. Thus: if the third-party system I’m currently using is also a benefactor of open-source communities (like, say, wordpress.com), it makes it less urgent to move away. And, when selecting replacements, select open source if at all possible.
    • Paying is better than getting something for free This might seem like a contrast to the previous rule, but I don’t think it is. When you use a free service, somebody’s paying the bills. Usually that means targeted advertising – think Facebook and Gmail. Paying service fees, on the other hand, and agreeing to the contract that comes with it, generally has the effect of making the relationship more transparent. Of course, this is far from absolute, but it seems reasonable in a broad sense. Plus, I like to support developers and services that are truly valuable.
    • Go for the low-hanging fruit In cases like email, there are well-established, straightforward (though not necessarily easy…ugh) ways of fending for yourself. No need to invent the wheel. On the other hand, some of the areas where alternatives are less obvious – social networking-type data springs to mind – also happen to be areas where I have some expertise and leverage. So, in those cases, it might be worth innovating.
    • Get the important stuff first My email history is more important to me than my Twitter history; the convenience of Github is more valuable to me than the convenience of Dropbox. Plan the Reclaim accordingly.
    • Get the vulnerable stuff first Recent statements by Twitter have made me think that the way I interact with the services is more subject to change in the upcoming months than, say, the way I interact with Gmail. That’s frightening. The more profit-hungry the company is – and, thus, the more disinclined to have the customer’s freedoms in mind – the more urgent it is to pull yourself out.

    Clearly, some of these considerations are at odds with each other. But they give a rough framework for deciding whether, when, and how to carry out the mission of Project Reclaim.

  2. Make the switch Here’s where the action happens: I do what I need to do to move myself to the replacement.
  3. Write about it This weekend I spent an afternoon on the problem of Twitter, and I ran into a ton of technical problems that remain unresolved. I imagine that there will be similar hurdles for each part of the project. I’m hoping that, by writing about the problems (and, where they exist, the solutions) I can help other people to take some of the same steps themselves, or even to spur someone really smart to come up with better solutions than the ones that currently exist.

What I expect from myself

My goal, ultimately, is to move away from third-party, closed-source services and platforms altogether. It might take some time. So I’ll make some interim goals: by the end of 2011, I’m hoping to have my email moved, my microblogging federated, my own backup system on my own server space, and my computer running an open-source OS.

Even if I manage to meet this goal, there’s a very real sense in which Project Reclaim will necessarily be an exercise in futility. I’ll always have to buy server space, and who’s to say that Amazon or Slicehost won’t go berserk tomorrow? I’ll always have to connect to the internet, which leaves me perpetually at the mercy of the ISPs, who are IMO more evil than all of the other service providers put together. It’s a depressing state of affairs: the kind of autonomy I want might be impossible given the way that the economy works. I take some solace in the fact that philosophers have spilled much ink over the problem of free will without coming up with a clear formulation of exactly what kind of autonomy would be worth arguing for. At least I’m not alone in my delusion.

That said, it’s a fight that I feel I have a responsibility to fight. If I’m going to continue to argue for the use and development of open source software, I have to start putting my money where my mouth is. And so, to me, Project Reclaim is less about my being a paragon of virtue, and more about my wanting to sleep a bit better at night.

Do I think that everyone should do this? People should prefer open solutions to closed ones, all things being equal. But generally, all things are not equal. Most people don’t have the time to write their own software, to run their own servers. For those people, decisions about their digital life are (rightly, I think) made more on the basis of aesthetics and convenience than lofty concepts like Autonomy and Ownership. But there are a few considerations that are perhaps relevant for the kinds of people who read my blog:

  • Open source developers who tout the importance of data ownership and other such freedoms have a special responsibility to model best behavior in these areas.
  • Academics, more than anyone, should be sensitive to the dangers of leaving the crucial pieces of one’s online self in the hands of corporate entities. That’s true for personal artifacts like email, but perhaps doubly so for scholarly work that ought to be part of a public trust.
  • Educators, like open source developers, should model best practices, encouraging students to take control over their digital identities.

So, while I wouldn’t belabor the point for the average Joe, I do think that people who consider themselves members of one of these groups – as most people reading my blog probably do – that they should think carefully about their relationship with the tools and services that enable their digital existence.

To freedom!

Fake Retweets

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Twitter communities are built on trust – sometimes too much trust. Recent XSS and XSRF exploits on Twitter have shown that the Twitter platform has been designed in a way that accidentally allows such trust to be used for evil purposes. My Fake Retweets experiment suggests that not all Twitter exploits are platform-level, architectural problems.

First things first: The real point of fake retweets is that they’re funny. What better way to make fun of your friends (or enemies) than to pretend to retweet stupid things that they allegedly said? I am not a performance artist, online or off.

Yet fake retweets do seem to say something worth saying about the medium. FRTs only work as a vehicle for jokes because there is a general assumption that all retweets are genuine. To some extent, this has nothing to do with Twitter. The only reason why jokes (or lies, or metaphors, or irony) work at all is because there exists a contrary convention that the jokester (liar, ironist) consciously flouts. In a world where people only tell lies, lies do not work in the same way that lies work in our world. I might lie about my dog eating my homework so that the teacher will give me an extension; but if there is no presumption in favor of truth, teachers will have no reason to grant an extension based on such a claim. (Echoes of Kant.) Jokes seem to work in a similar way: if we all spoke in puns all the time, for instance, then the utterance of a pun would have no element of surprise, robbing the joke of much of its value.

Thus the efficacy of fake retweets is at least in part an instance of a broader phenomenon. Anecdotally, though, it seems like Twitter is a particularly fertile yet underutilized environment for this kind of convention-flouting. With limited exceptions, people on Twitter generally seem to believe that everyone else is being genuine. There are some counterexamples, like Mark Sample‘s #MarksDH2010 or accounts like FakeAPStylebook. But both are either so absurd that no one could possibly think that they weren’t fake, or actively wear their fakeness on their sleeves with hashtags, or both. (This fact doesn’t necessarily take away from the funniness of the jokes in question. It just means that they don’t have the intent to deceive.) Aside from these sorts of extravagant Twitter charades, it’s hard to think of examples (from personal experience) where real live lying takes place on Twitter.

That’s not to say that my Fake Retweets were meant to deceive. (But they did. In one instance, a follower who commented on the fakeness of one retweet took another one as serious just a few minutes later.) The spirit of Fake Retweets in this case is to poke fun at friends, which means that my FRTs were mainly friendly and totally directed at friends. Yet I have to admit a little trepidation to the FRT, even with such benign content. There’s something about faking another person’s voice (perhaps especially in a community of academics) that seems to cross a sacred line.

The sense of violation in FRTs, it seems, is related to the fact that we all spend so much effort cultivating a specific persona via Twitter. Yet again, such cultivation is not a Twitter-specific phenomenon – surely there’s a sense in which personae are necessarily self-constructed – but it seems to be especially evident on Twitter. Maybe it’s because on Twitter, you control your own stream. In real life, all my eloquence and fashion won’t prevent the occasional piece of food in my teeth; in meatspace, there are infinite vectors for our self-constructed selves to get out of hand. Twitter, in contrast, has very few dimensions for self-presentation to run amok: tweets are finite in length and in number, you get to choose your avatar, you can spend hours crafting your 140-character pearls, you can even edit and delete mistaken tweets. The FRT threatens to cleave this controlled space, to taint our carefully manicured self-images.

The aspects of Twitter that make FRTs so uncomfortable aren’t necessarily bad things. Maybe the world would be a better place if it were as trusting as the Twitter community. (Though I wouldn’t want to be vulnerable to cross-site scripting in real life.) But certainly there is room for a little more skepticism when you see something come across your screen. Think before you click that link, before you believe that RT.