Re: Twitter and Iran Elections

Hi again,

Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> Thanks for raising this.
> 
> On 16/6/09 20:46, Harry Halpin wrote:
>> I'm sure everyone has now heard about the roll Twitter is playing in
>> the current protests in Iran (apparently 15,000 tweets an hour, which
>> I'm trying to follow rather unsuccessfully). In particular, it has
>> received lots of news coverage [1] as Iran has shut down Facebook [2]
>> (although apparently now access is unblocked, which should be familiar
>> to those of us who remember Iran filtering Orkut.
> 
> Yeah, a lot has changed since 
> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/2252220&tid=153&tid=95 ...
> 
> In Jan 2005, there wasn't yet a lot of discussion about social network 
> portability, interop, mobility etc. Orkut was something like 20% or more 
> Iranian, until they were removed overnight by ISP-level blocks.

Interesting. That I did not know.

> The big different today seems to be APIs. Even if Twitter is 
> centralised, ... the possibilities for proxied and indirected access are 
> much greater, since code can legitimately hold posting credentials. 

Absolutely true. Twitter has a huge amount of its traffic coming via its API. It 
used to be 10 times the site traffic in late 2007 [1]. Since the API is dead 
simple to use, there was a massive eco-system growing around the service which 
utilizes the 2-way API. That makes hard to block both, content production and 
content consumption. Interesting, from this side I have never looked at it.

 > When Orkut was blocked, there were efforts like OrkutProxy, but ultimately
 > they were also blocked at the Google side, since Google didn't want user
 > passwords going thru an intermediary.
 > I don't know the Twitter API but I
 > know they have OAuth efforts underway, which takes away some of these
 > concerns.

Twitter did not take care of this in favor of the eco-system to grow. If it had, 
it would by far not be so big right now. There were a number of attacks based on 
this issue and still are. The Password-Anti-Pattern is still a huge issue on the 
Social Web.
OAuth support was released a couple of months ago and is slowly being adopted.

Cheers,
Alex

[1] many sources, e.g. 
http://readwritetalk.com/2007/09/05/biz-stone-co-founder-twitter/

-- 
Alexander Korth
alex@ttbc.de
m +49-1577-1704501

Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 19:45:35 UTC