Crazy on Twitter

Hey guys, remember back when I posted in January about @astrospace, the guy who freaked on Twitter? Well, he's still around - and still pissing people off! Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I learned of a petition to get the guy removed from Twitter altogether for abusive behavior. Not only is he rude and slanderous, he's actually stalked and purposefully harassed people. He's obsessed with having large amounts of followers, and he deletes the bad things he says to try and cover his tracks.

You can (and should!) read all about him here. He used the name @astronautics for a while, and now goes by @spaceastro.

So what do we do about this idiot? Well, there's the petition, which I tweeted about earlier tonight. I don't know how much it will do since he has so many accounts and aliases, but it certainly can't hurt to try. I hope that the women he called and harassed are seeing legal advice on what (if anything) they can do.

If you're curious, here's a posting that has the text of the blog post he deleted from his site that I mentioned in my first post about him - the one where he goes off about Twitter. You can tell by his writing that there is something seriously wrong with this guy.

I'm all about people trying to make a name for themselves online - but don't do it by pretending that you're an authoritative news source (when you aren't) or by hurting others with the awful things you say and do.

How NOT to handle yourself on Twitter

A while back I started following @astrospace on Twitter -the official account for Space and Astronautics News. This shouldn't surprise anyone - I love space! And science! Yay! However, whoever running the account almost never tweeted about space! Or science! Very disappointing. Often it was about how many followers they had, and no real news. But I kept following them anyway, mostly because I'm too lazy to unfollow people.

ANYHOW.

Last night the person behind this account had some sort of crazy emotional breakdown, and I was there to witness the whole thing. Somehow, in a short period of time, @astrospace lost 8000 followers, and FLIPPED OUT about it. They started talking about how horrible of a company Twitter was, and how they were fed up and deleting their account. @jonathanstark posted this awesome screen shot of the whole mess. Minutes after that last tweet, the account was changed over to @zx152 - as of today, this account is completely gone, and the @astrospace account only has a few tweets, with the latest one actually being about space news. But last night it linked to a blog post which they claimed "this will be syndicated internationally on major news sites" and was basically a huge post of nothing but slanderous nonsense about Twitter and how the company is "scum" and should be shut down. Not surprisingly, this post is now nowhere to be found, which leaves me to believe they are full of crap.

So what's the lesson here? Don't be a dick on Twitter - simple as that. Sure, maybe it was Twitter's fault that @astrospace lost that many followers, but come on! There is no need to be an unprofessional, whiny, ignorant dolt when you don't get your way. The idea of perpetual beta online means that sometimes things get messed up, and you need to chill and go with the flow. Twitter didn't even have a chance to respond to this jerk, and I'm glad they didn't. The kinds of mean and hateful things that @astrospace wrote in that blog post don't deserve a response. The person behind this account only made themself look like a fool to all of their followers.

Check out this posting on the Get Satisfaction customer service site, and great post about the whole mess can be found here.

Things #11 & 12 - LibraryThing and Twitter

So I found out after my last post that the stats feature on Flickr has not only been around a while (aka, not new at all), but is only available to people with pro accounts. So... yeah. Sorry about that. But if you have a pro account and haven't seen your stats, you should really get on that.

Anyhow, THIS post is all about LibraryThing and Twitter! I'm combining them into one since I already have accounts with both services. I joined Twitter earlier this year after I finally caught up with the rest of the world and got a texting plan, but I've been on LibraryThing since 2006! In fact, I even got to meet Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, at the 2007 OLC Convention & Expo. Here's my catalog on LibraryThing, and my Twitter page. Feel free to friend me/follow me on either service!

One of the features on LibraryThing that I haven't explored much (but really should!) is LibraryThing Local. What a great opportunity for libraries to advertise our events to the kinds of people that would want to come to them! Also, I just wanted to mention how I love the fact that the largest group on the site is "Librarians Who LibraryThing," with just over 5000 members! Although really, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the kinds of people who want to catalog their own books would also be the kinds of people who become librarians.

Twitter is pretty new to me still but I'm really enjoying it. I like being able to record the random thoughts I have during the day, and read all about what my friends and colleagues are doing. However, when I try to explain how it works to people that don't know anything about it, I usually get blank stares. Maybe it isn't for everyone. But I can definitely see where libraries could use this to easily post quick updates on their website, or maybe just to connect to our customers and let them know what's going on that day at the library.