Slashdot Mirror
Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration
WSJdpatton writes "The growth of services like Twitter and Dodgeball, which tie together instant messaging, social networking and wireless communication, elicits mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
That sounds... not hygienic.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Once upon a time, a post that would have been a troll, or maybe the Subject: line in a spam sent on behalf of a coprophagy fetish site.
But today, thanks to Shitter, (a new Web 2.0 mashup based on Twitter API), turds of a feather can flock together, for only $0.10 per SMS received.
Yes, now you too can always know what sorts of shit your friends are pumping out through the Intertubes. For the past three weeks, people have joined the crowds on Shitter.com, a site that invites everyone to answer the question: "What are you dumping?"
"I didn't get it at first," said the Goatse Guy. "How much information do I really need to let the world know about me?", but with the demise of ratemypoop.com (a Web 1.0 predecessor to the fecal networking ecosystem), "I've been getting dozen or more 'flushes' a day" - quick, as-they-happen updates to friends who had chosen to link to him through the service. Topics ranged from the effects of lunch (a bowl of corn chowder, a bowl of chili, or a bag of Olestra-based nachos) to work annoyances (a nearby co-worker in an adjacent stall who made the most annoying sounds while wiping his ass). Goatse sends flushes from his office and home computers, and uses his cellphone to send posts from the back woods or even the rank washrooms of a bar at happy hour. "It became addicting very quickly," he said...
Shitter's Mr. Horsey said his company is fine-tuning the service so that members can specify groups of friends whose flushes they receive, though he declined to say when the new features would be available. He defended the site's often scatalogical content. "Everyone says Shitter's completely useless, I don't want all this information," he said. "We check in later, and they're complete addicts."
Despite her gripe with Mr. Goatse's flushes, Helena Handbasket said she's only unsubscribed from a few other people's bowls. She doesn't even mind the occasional dinner Shittering, she said. "I'm actually kind of interested in what people have been eating."
Back in my day, we called it netiquette. Damn kids. *Swipes at them with his Newton*.
'tis but a scratch.
OMG Ponies!!!!11
:P)
(sorry, just couldn't help it
They had to put up with a horrible mental disorder called thinking. You younger people may not have heard of this, but many of us were afflicted with it in the past. For those of you unfamiliar, imagine being in a waiting room with no cell phone, not even a magazine to read, and no one but strangers around you. At first you try to occupy your mind by examining the pattern on the carpet, but slowly -and no matter how hard you try, you can't help it- your mind will start to wander. You will start to have the most unnerving thoughts. It starts with things that aren't too bad like "what am I going to have for dinner," but will escalate to things like "I wonder what it would be like to go out with that girl over there," or "why did we invade Iraq." These thoughts will leave you very uncomfortable because there is no way to know the answer to them for sure. Essentially, "thinking" leads to more thinking, and just pushes you closer to insanity. And if you think you can avoid the problem by talking to the person next to you, think again. Just imagine trying to talk to someone you don't know. You have no idea how they will react to what you say (unlike your friends and family, whose responses are very predictable). I, for one, am so glad I have a cell phone to help preent the onset of insanity.