Most awesome Twitter tool I've seen in a long time - TrueTwit

An acquaintance from the NYTM mailing list, Elaine Lee, turned me on to the most useful, most effective anti-spam anti-autofollow bot tool I've ever seen to hit Twitter: TrueTwit.

This service detects new followers and sends them a DM on your behalf (yes, I generally despise auto DMs, but only when they're disingenuous/spammy) asking them to verify their human-ness via reCAPTCHA on the TrueTwit website.

Once the new follower has successfully solved the reCAPTCHA challenge, TrueTwit will email you a notification very similar to the basic Twitter new follower notification. (Which TrueTwit recommends you turn off -- the point IS to avoid noise, after all.) From there you can choose to view the user's profile, or ignore, as you wish.

TrueTwit reduces the amount of time you spend looking at profiles to determine whether or not someone is worth following by eliminating all the non-human accounts BAM! right off the bat. Two thumbs up! My aggravation and distraction levels just dipped a point or two.

Software Architects Are Like Condoms from My 25 Percent

I keep forgetting to post these pics

The pics from the Twitter Times Square billboard project on June 8th are available on Picasa.

I bought stamps today

I bought a book of first class US mail stamps today for the first time in ... probably something like 5-7 years. Unquestionably over half a decade.

I nursed my last two stamp books until sometime in 2008 ... they were 30-something, .34 or .37 maybe. I would simply slap two of those babies on outgoing mail -- the rare pieces that I sent -- and said mail would arrive happily at its destination.

I've sent other pieces of mail here and there, but I either have the postage rung up at a counter, or via an online service, or I use UPS or FedEx. And when it comes down to it, I don't send a lot of first class mail, period.

It shocked me to think how long it had been since I had laid out money on good old stamps. I remember licking stamps as a kid. Will my kids even use stamps?

I declare "Spymaster" a #fail

This game had real potential. Good spam control (even if it did still somewhat encourage self-serving spam), new behaviors and equipment available with level-ups, the ability to purchase revenue-generating assets, to transfer money between players, to assassinate your frenemies.

Unfortunately they failed on a few counts. They totally bungled the handling of an exploit that was reported by active users -- the game staff replied by wiping out those users' accounts. OK, that's a mistake, maybe a forgivable one. Unfortunately there's a more fatal failure: you hit level 30, which took about a week of regular play, and wham, you hit a wall. No new content.

The game staff promised new content "hopefully by Friday" -- of last week. Friday the 5th of June. Today is Thursday the 11th. Still no new content, no way for people to advance, so instead a lot of players are getting slaughtered by the more aggressively-situated players, losing their hard-earned weapons and armored cars, with no way to fix it or get around it. At best, those players will have a TON of ground to make up if the yahoos at iList ever get around to adding new content like they promised.

Fail. Completely frustrating, disappointing fail. But hey, I hope you guys at least got the viral benefits out of this for iList while failing a quickly devoted community. What a piss poor lack of prior planning and foresight. #fail #spymaster