The Core

*coughs*. I noticed my permissions disappeared a few years back. However, knock knock?

There's long been rumbles, but IMO it's more a case of wanting freedom to pursue national agendas outside EU restrictions (cf recent moved in Poland and Hungry to control their judiciary, for example). However, the economic benefits remain too enticing to leave - hence why even Greece at its lowest point a few years ago wouldn;t, and why even the xenophobes in the UK are struggling to agree an agreement to leave.

Neil Gaiman is the one that comes to mind right away.

He's already a best-selling author with a long history of social presence online via his blog.

And Facebook search is still crap.

It's almost impossible to find people you aren't directly connected with. Am trying to find old friends from my old home town - it's in my profile, but when I search their names, FB still returns people from the US.

If FB implemented a search based on location and/or likes, school, etc, it would be a killer.

Instead, it's great for people near you, useless for those who aren't.

Aren't the word combination "Android" and "privacy" a complete oxymoron?

This NSA stuff seems like really, really old news to me.

It is - there's a US Base near York in the UK called Menwith Hill, whose job is to hoover all of Europe's ecommunications and filter them against sensitive keywords. Been doing it for years. For some reason it's getting no coverage, even though I thought this was public domain stuff.

I guess it's just American's feeling outraged that they might be subjected to the same surveillence the US imposes on the rest of the world.

I'm still waiting for all these gun owners - who say they must have arms to protect against corrupt government - to actually do something. Seems they're happy to be spied on without permission and imprisoned without trial by their own government. Wonder what it'll take to make them actually rise up and live up to their posturing BS.

So I've finally begun to explore Twitter, and followed how information content is acted up.

And so far, I'm seeing response rates as pitiful.

I had a Tweet retweeted in front of about 20K people to a forum thread, and saw about 200 actual clickthroughs from this.

I'm finding similar on other information content being linked to from other people.

My impression so far is that Twitter is basically acting like an email list - but that most of the emails are so full of crap most followers have long fatigued from caring from such notices.

I figure, by analogy, if you are on an email list that sends you 10 emails a day, mostly chatter about what they're having for lunch and similar banality, how long would you pay attention to that?

I'm basically wondering if I'm coming out on the overly-cynical side of this, or whether Twitter has some kind of proven CTA statistics based on normal use (as a follower) as opposed to special offers (promoted Tweets).