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pmuellr is Patrick Mueller

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Saturday, March 03, 2007

No, it doesn't work

I-guess-its-obvious.png

Everyone seems to be all atwitter over Twitter. James Governer blogs about it, the Joyeur guys podcast about it, etc, etc.

This one, a bit like Second Life, sounds interesting, and at the same time, a waste of time. But I'm always trying to keep an open mind. So a few days ago I got an account, figured out how to 'follow' someone (though not sure I could do it again), and then waited for something to happen. Which it didn't. So this afternoon, I go to the site, click the Help link, only to be told "It works!".

"It works!" in some default goop that Apache dumps on your system when you install it. Basically, if you haven't finished configuring your server, or malconfigured your server, expect to see a web page saying "It works!".

Searching for some more background on "It works", I found this following hilarious exchange:

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-apache@lists.debian.org/msg08515.html

Make sure you read the response 'marked as done'. I may be reading that wrong, but it appears that a program decided to change the status of a bug based on the text in the subject line of the message.

This is reminiscent of the lovely authentication messages in CVS, "I LOVE YOU" and "I HATE YOU", especially when those messages leak out to the user.

Anyhoo, still no idea how to 'use' Twitter, but I think I'll survive.

BTW, I enjoy the Joyeur podcasts, "ps pipe grep", referenced above, but that might just be because I'm a customer; my teeny web site is hosted there.

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