John’s Crawlspace

For those of you familiar with Twitter (that should be most of you by now), there tends to be a correlation between the amount of followers that a user has and the quality of that user’s tweets. If someone is new to Twitter, that’s one thing. But if you consistently spit out quality tweets, you will eventually have a sizable following on the site. For this reason (and a handful of other reasons), people want as many followers as possible.

Every few weeks, there is a new “get XX followers now!” scheme that pops up. I remember when I first started messing with Twitter (over a year ago) it was a service called Flashtweet. At the time, Flashtweet was free. You logged in, and the service would allow you to look at any Twitter user’s followers. You could follow all of them, and then wait for them to follow you back. Wait a few hours or a day or whatever, and then unfollow the ones that didn’t follow you back - Or unfollow all of them if you wanted. This seemed to work somewhat well, and I used to to build up Twitter accounts for some clients at the time. They still have rather large followings on the site, regardless of the frequency of their tweets.

The latest of these sites is Spread My Tweets! I messed around with it for a little while this morning, and it definitely works - You give it your login info, and it follows 15-20 people using your account, but in exchange, you get 40-50 new followers. I don’t know how new this site is, but it seems to be spreading like wildfire. I’d imagine that it is only a matter of time until Twitter tweaks their API or something so that the site no longer works.

The idea was appealing to me at first, but then it dawned on me - I have to be suspicious about the quality of the followers that you gain by using this site. I doubt many of them would end up being genuinely interested in the things you’ll be tweeting in the future, and most of them will most likely go through and unfollow when they’re done using the service. It really is just a number, and if these new followers won’t ever interact with you or retweet your content or anything, what’s the point?

Anyway, if you follow me on twitter, and happened to see some weird garbage this morning about gaining new followers, that was where it came from.

For more about these “get followers quick” methods, check out this post from KMK Blog.

I discovered Chatroulette last weekend, although apparently the site has been around since last November. For those of you familiar with Omegle, Chatroulette basically took that concept (being instantly connected with a random chat partner, with the ability to skip to someone new with the click of a button) and threw webcams into the mix.

If I hadn’t already tried the site out and someone explained the site to me, I would have had no interest. When was the last time I used a webcam… Probably when I was in high school?

When I first went on the site, some of my friends were hanging out, and we ended up spending a good 2 hours on there screwing around. The vast majority of the people on there are either guys with their shirts off, guys trying to get girls to take their shirts off, guys beating it like mad (this happens a lot, need to be quick with the ‘next’ button), dorm rooms full of guys waiting to yell “HEY FAGGOT!” at you, fake celebrities (although the Jonas Brothers are apparently on the site all the time), or lemonparty/goatse surprises. Sounds awesome, right? I know I’m not doing a very good job at selling this site, but if you can stomach the things I just mentioned, it’s actually pretty fun to go on with some friends. You’ll be clicking ‘next’ a lot, but there are some pretty funny/bizarre things going on that make it all worth it. Oh yeah, and there are actually girls on there too… You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I ended up having a few long (10+ minute) conversations with people/groups of people. It’d be very easy to say that this site is for people with no friends or too much time on their hands, but I still think it’s a pretty cool concept, and if nothing else it provides some mindless entertainment on a Friday night while you’re drinking with some friends before going out or whatever.

This site is the sort of thing that reminds me that I’ve spent a lot more time on the internet over the years than my friends have. I click “next” and a guy hanging from a noose pops up. Friends say “holy shit, a dead guy!” I say “relax, it’s from Stile Project” (covered by yours truly here on March 5th, 2000) and then feel like some sort of weird wise old internet grandfather.

People displaying images like the hanging Stile, lemonparty, and other gross/amazingly awesome internet memes are most likely waiting to capture the look of shock/disgust on your face via screen shot and post it on /b/. So yeah, keep in mind that anything you do on here can very easily be saved and posted somewhere else.

If you don’t plan on checking out the site, but want to stay “in the loop”, here’s a good article about Chatroulette from NYMag.

Oh yeah, and if it isn’t implied already… “NSFW”.

Some “pranksters” have attached a GPS to the Google Street View car that is currently making its way through the streets of Berlin. A group called Free Art & Technology (FAT) created a map that allowed people to track the car. It looks like this only lasted for a short period of time (before Google realized what was going on and removed the GPS device), but it’s funny to see the tables turned - Who is spying on who now?

Check out live coverage of Apple’s latest product, the “iPad”, here.

I’m no Apple fanboy (I don’t even own an iPhone), but this thing sounds pretty cool.

The iPad was born out of the question “everyone uses a laptop and/or a smartphone - is there room for a third category device in the middle?” So far, the things that stood out to me about the iPad thus far (coverage is continuing):

• Multi-touch integration, “super responsive and super precise”
• On-screen keyboard. “It’s a dream to type on”
• Music… Itunes store integration
• View movies and TV shows in HD
• Half an inch thin, weighs 1.5 pounds. Thinner and lighter than any netbook on the market. 9.7 inch IPS display
• Powered by Apple’s A4 chip - “it screams”. 1GHz
• 16, 32, or 64 GB of flash storage.
• 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Accelerometer, compass, speaker, mic, dock connector
• “We’ve been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life… It’s got a month of standby life…”
• Compatible with all existing App Store apps. New SDK out today including iPad tools.
• An ebook reader (”iBooks”) that looks to rival the functionality of the Kindle.

“At $499 a lot of people can afford an iPad. 16GB is our base model. For 32GB it’s $100 more, and for $100 more than that you get $64GB. The 3G models cost another $130.”

The WiFi models will be shipping in 60 days, and the WiFi + 3G models in 90.

Update: Watching the launch was kind of cool, but once the hype wore off, I realized that I really don’t need one of these. My money would be spent much better elsewhere. If you’re up in the air about the iPad, check out Gizmodo’s 8 things that suck about the iPad.

I didn’t know this until today, but Google has an open source web browser, “Chrome“, that will be released today at 18:00 (not sure why they felt the need for military time). This comic sort of explains what inspired the creation of the browser, and some of its features, and you can check out some screen shots here. Or, you could wait a few hours and download it yourself. Right now, google.com/chrome gives a 404 (not found) error, but I’m thinking you’ll probably be able to download it from there (or here) later today. This could be interesting… Each tab is ‘independent’, so if a website causes your browser to crash, only the offending tab will close - You won’t lose all of your other tabs, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.