An unfortunate event happened recently whereby a Twitter user, using the magic of RSS feeds, sent his blog entries to Tumblr. In his experimentation, his Tumblr entries were fed to the social networking service Twitter which is picked up by another service, Friendfeed. He also set Friendfeed to–and this is where things got out of hand–send back entries to Twitter which is set up to be mirrored to Tumblr.
Many people on the internet use more than one kind of service. Nowadays blogging is almost de facto. You’re not really taking advantage of the internet unless you blog. If you keep a diary or a journal on a website, no matter where or how, you’re a blogger.
Social networking is a relatively new phenomenon that exploded on the internet. It’s been years in the making (to the best of my knowledge LiveJournal is the first with an actual social networking feature but not many people saw it as such until recently), but only burst on to the scene thanks to Twitter which allows short entries of up to 140 characters. Twitter users can subscribe or follow other Twitter users to receive their updates if they are interested. The brevity and rapid nature of Twitter drew a lot of people in and makes it very easy to use on mobile phones. In some countries you can use SMS to send and receive Twitter updates.
Friendfeed is similar to Twitter although its main claim to differentiate is its ability to accept more than 140 characters, a comment system for each entry, and allowing its users to pull any update from any site that they have access to. So for example if you post photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, made an entry on your blog or on Twitter, and save a bookmark on Delicious, you can set up your Friendfeed account to announce and display all that to the world. If you wish.
Tumblr is one of several blogging sites that also incorporates social net as a drawcard.
All those sites and services are able to do all that thanks to the magic of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which allows people to subscribe to updates on sites that employ this feature in a way that’s similar to subscribing to newspaper except you get to choose the topics. And it’s mostly free.
Sites are also able to catch and display RSS feeds if they are set up that way. This is how the above scenario became a nightmare.
A series of posts became caught in that loop and as a result it got sent and resent across all those services, flooding the stream of updates and disrupts the flow. Unfortunately this was left unchecked and the poor fellow did not realize the gravity of what he did. He was actually quite amused and possibly proud of what he’s done.
Within a short time, people who followed him who initially thought there was a glitch became more than mildly annoyed–and in some cases, including mine, enraged–because his repeated and unwanted updates kept coming in.
In my case, his updates flooded my Twitter as well as my Tumblr pages.
As with everything on the internet, an error or mistake no matter how small, will always snowball into massive proportions quickly if not fixed within minutes. This particular user had left the internet for nearly one day. Imagine the uproar of the victims.
When he found out, he was surprisingly offended at the rage he received in messages directed at him and instead of fixing and apologizing, he deleted his Twitter account and left. And then complained in his blog that it was a small mistake and he didn’t deserve such criticism.
Well buddy, your flood of updates was like spam. You deserved all that you got.
AuliaSays 