Posts Tagged → Friendfeed
Despite DDoS, Twitter Still Rules
The social networking world was turned upside down yesterday when Twitter and Facebook were victims of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack making the service difficult to access yesterday. This attack is nothing new as many sites have been attacked in this manner. The buzz around technology related sites this morning is that the attack was really targeting one individual because of his stand on the Georgia versus Russia situation. With many social networking sites having a connection to Twitter, the attack was far reaching. There are many places such as Friendfeed, Facebook, blogs and other sites that will pull Twitter posts to their sites. In fact this very page shows my Twitter posts on the right side of this page.
To clarify what a DDoS attack is and how it works I will try to explain. A malicious person will find open computers around the world and upload a “bot”, or a program that runs automatically at set times. This person will upload these bots onto other computers as they find them open. These bots will ping a site continuously from many different victim computers sort of like what happens when you are access a web site. These attempts to reach the site are at such a high volume that it takes up all of their bandwidth preventing legitimate users from being able to access the site. When I say bandwidth, I am referring to a sort of a pipeline and its size. The larger the size of pipeline, the more data that can be sent through the pipe. If all the contents of the pipe are being consumed, then nothing else is left for anyone else.
Twitter still rules the social networking world despite what you may hear from other sites. The reason I say this is because if you actually go to Friendfeed, you will find that at least 50% of the traffic on there started by a Twitter post. Of course from there, people will comment on Friendfeed. The same can be said for Facebook because most of the traffic that I see are originally posted as Twitter. Most of these sites have their own features that are very useful but again they depend on the traffic that is generated by Twitter. With each news story that comes out putting down Twitter, they continue to grow. In fact their growth is exponential with each story that comes out. This is probably a result of people’s desire to follow the crowd. In fact just this morning I un-followed 500 people/bots/strangers. I will admit that I love the ability to get news from Twitter in real time even before it is on the news. I can find out when a roll over accident is on the freeway before it is even broadcast on television.
So unless someone can come up with a tool that is so easy to use through short messaging system (SMS) they will continue to rule. With smart phones becoming more prevalent people can update a news story directly from the site. Instantly millions of people will know within minutes. In some cases these posts actually result in the media’s attention instead of the other way around. Having Twitter is empowering to the individual. As it has been seen recently, there were individuals in Iran that were posting to the world the violence that was going on. These Twitter posts were fed into many social networking sites and also to the news media. In fact every major news entity in the United States has a Twitter page. I know some people that use them just to follow news sites so that when something happens, they get a message to their phones. It is inevitable that at some point a new technology will come out and unseat Twitter as the major social tool but for now they remain on top. I will continue to follow these technologies and see new breakthrough tools as they develop.
Update June 14, 2008
This week I have been in school half days at work. They have me taking a class on how to use a program that my office will never use. My job series uses this program but in my particular office, it will never be used. I am always open for training at work whether it is relevant or not because it always helps to make me more rounded and better qualified for future opportunities. I just want to thank God for helping me to stay healthy this year allowing me to build my leave (vacation) back up. In 2007, I had a bad year where I was sick all the time and missed a lot of work. I missed more days last year than I have missed during the last three years combined. This year I moved to a new position that I am thrilled to be in. Now I can actually look forward to going to work. My wife works down stairs and down the hall from me so I have been pretty blessed on that. With gas getting out of control, it is comforting to know that I can ride to work with my wife. I was browsing around on Friendfeed and stumbled on a streaming audio of an HF radio being streamed on Ustream. I have been listening to a net in Tennessee for a while and it is pretty interesting. You can find it here.
My son had some friends over last night until midnight and that was pretty fun and relaxing. Around 10:00 pm we had a line of thunderstorms that came through and the line progressed across the same place for a couple hours and I loved that. I am always open for a thunderstorm. I love to keep the rain coming as late in the year as possible because once the ground gets dried out, we start heating up above 100 degrees and I am not looking forward to that. Last year and this year we have managed to keep the ground wet enough to keep the temperatures relatively low. I was listening to our local NBC affiliate KFOR this morning and they just told of someone here in Del City entering a funeral home and stole the belongings of the mourners at a funeral. It is hard to comprehend someone lacking morals to that degree. If you will steal from someone mourning the loss of a loved one, then you are a sorry human being.
I know I am usually hard on the media and rightfully so because of their political slant in their reporting. Yesterday Tim Russert had a heart attack and died and I would like to pass my condolences to his family. He seemed to be willing to listen to both sides of the conversation when others would not. I heard he collapsed while at work at NBC. I wish his family the best and feel for their loss.
I have a lot of school work this weekend to catch up on as the unit ends tomorrow. I normally do not wait this late to finish up my work but last weekend we had some welcome family and we had a very good time. My wife’s sister and her daughter came to see us after their home was hit with a tornado and we really enjoyed their stay. I hope they are able to get the damage repaired without too much trouble.
This year we managed to get a lot of growth cleared out of the fence line.
As you can see from this picture, you cannot see through the fence and see the houses behind the house. In this picture you can see how one of our neighbor’s tree fell across the fence taking the power lines down. This was a couple years ago. We have lost power so many times because of all this growth out of control. Little by little, we have cleaned out this brush to where there is none left. After the ice storm last December we decided that it all needs to go because it has been growing into the power lines and you could not work on anything. I am pleased to say today there is no vegetation left along the fence line all the way around the property. Hopefully we can keep our electricity the next storm that passes over us. Well I have covered just about everything I can think of so I better get this posted. Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: Friendfeed, ham radio, trees, brush, clearing, Tim Russert, storm, Del City, Ustream
NBA Finals
Last night I watched game two of the NBA finals and between weather advisories I saw the Boston Celtics win again. I have nothing against the Lakers but I am pulling for the Celtics. The conventional wisdom is that the Lakers will win and that may be true but I would like to see the Celtics win their first one after 20+ years. I joined a Friendfeed room devoted to the NBA finals and we discussed the game as it played and that was pretty cool. As I have previously posted, I love the rain but last night they interrupted the game over and over again. The storms didn’t even arrive for hours after the game was over.
We had a pretty good weekend with my sister in-law, and her daughter coming to stay with us after their house was damaged in a tornado. They had no power and we all know how miserable that can be after we experienced that ice storm last December. I just saw on television that it is only 71 degrees at 5:00 pm in June. Man I can take some of that! I am sure hopeful that it stays this cool for a while but I know that is a stretch. They also said we received 3.04 inches of rain since midnight but it is over. We are expecting fog tonight which is unheard of in June. I sure wish I could have been off work so I could have seen some of the rain. Well I am rambling but I sure am looking forward to the next NBA game. This post is a perfect example of how incoherent a person can be when watching TV while typing a post. I guess I better get this posted
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: NBA, Celtics, Lakers, thunderstorms, Friendfeed
My New Favorite Toy
I speak about social networking quite often and have raved about Facebook, Twitter, among others and more recently about Friendfeed. When I first signed up for it a couple weeks ago, I really did not see the attraction but in keeping with my sign up for everything new attitude I signed up. If you are unsure of what Friendfeed is all about, it is basically a feed of all of your social networks in one spot. There are nearly 35 different social networks plus your personal blogs. At first it seemed full of disorganized text and not really useful.
Since I use Twitter all the time, it shows my Twitter messages (Tweets) almost instantaneously. I noticed one day that people had commented to my Twitter messages on Friendfeed page. It allows people who are not on Twitter to respond to my Twitter messages, plus Pownce, Del.icio.us, Flickr, GTalk, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Blogs, and a ton of other services. I have come to spend a considerable amount of time on Friendfeed to see and respond to people from 30 plus systems at once.
How nice it is to have a laptop with wifi because we have family staying with us this weekend and I can still get on the computer without waking up the family. This morning I can hear the wind howling again this morning. Anyway, back on topic… I am amazed at how much news and information I can find in one place like I can on Friendfeed. It is interesting how people post their comments about news stories, happenings, and their events on what ever service they choose and I can read it all in one place and respond. Sometimes I send a Twitter post from my cell phone and I get responses on Friendfeed. Yes I know, I am a sucker to a new toy on the Internet. Even this blog post will show up on my Friendfeed page.
Another cool feature that friendfeed has is the “rooms” feature. You can create a room about any specific topic and people can join it and it keeps all posts related to this subject in one central location making the conversation easier to follow. I know I am addicted again but it is really a lot of fun. I hear rustling in the house so I think others are awake so I will send this and go see the family.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
Tags: Friendfeed, Twitter, Flickr, StumblUpon, Facebook, Gtalk, Del.icio.us, Pownce, Blog, Paul L. McCord Jr.
