The last week has been quite eventful, there have been two seemingly unrelated developments involving Facebook that deserve close attention. The bigger event, storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters is being discussed and written upon by nearly everyone who is capable of forming an opinion and is interested in US and World politics. So for now I would prefer to not wade into the politics except where it intersects tech ecosystem.
Over the decade social media platforms have grown phenomenally, in early years there were comparisons of user base of Facebook, for example, with the population of the US and then with India's and China's but now that the number has reached 2 billion and growing that particular metric has been discarded. It is no longer about the numbers alone now but the volume of information being disseminated on them which is pretty much eclipsing traditional media and becoming the dominant space for all kind of discourses globally and especially political discourses.With such monopoly over information dissemination and ability to impact societies and polities significantly it is but natural that governments and the political system would turn their attention towards them and some of them seem to be happening lately.
Lately my Twitter timeline has been providing me with some sort of amusement at what seems to be a counter-campaign by the UIDAI and its supporters to control the narrative or at least fight the perception battle to the relentless anti-Aadhaar campaign being run on the micro-blogging platform by online activists since last few years. It has perhaps became important for UIDAI to take initiative as the discourse on Twitter has largely been controlled by those opposed to it and a part of the mainstream media, since the media inevitably picks up the dominant narrative on Twitter. Also, with the Supreme Court judgment on Aadhaar coming out any time, it might have seemed imperative for the UIDAI to undo some damage to the reputation of the Authority on social media, which would undoubtedly be important if the Court makes the Aadhaar truly voluntary. Whatever be the motivation, the fact is there is a Twitter war over Aadhaar in progress and its an interesting one.
Lately I have come across the word "troll" being used extensively on the Web and especially on Twitter and to be honest, every time I come across it there is a bit of resentment in me. Internet trolls are almost as ancient creatures as their folk-lore counterparts are supposed to be but the perhaps the former needs to be redefined. But then trolling was once considered an art (even if a dark art) which required some sort of skill but the latest breed of trolls on Twitter are more like sociopaths with 0 IQ.
When @dibyabttbtweeted asking about the origin of Twitter's Fail Whale icon, I knew my reply would require much more than 140 characters,so here is a post on this unusual phenomena of a graphic.
If you are even an average user of Web 2.0 services,you are more than likely to have come across the term Fail Whale which Twitter.com displays to indicate that the server is down due to user overload.
Oops @ShashiTharoor has done it again! Does he serenade controversies or controversies have ways of seeking him out ?
I believe it is a little bit of both. For over-excited media channels vying with each other for TRPs, a candid Shashi Tharoor on a promiscuously open platform like Twitter, it is a wet dream and there is no way they could miss such golden opportunities to manufacture news. In this instance too the controversy couldn't have started without the media's active contribution. But then those were not verbal statements that were then put in words by a reporter to mean differently,the minister had tweeted them and they are still there for the whole world to see. How could he then have been quoted out of context ?
Well, the media is seldom neutral while reporting news , it tends to be far more judgmental and passionate, even to the point of being untruthful. In almost every instance of news reporting, the facts,allegations are never served in isolation but are packaged with the opinion of the journalist, which again is influenced by her/his craving for sensationalism. This exactly isn't a secret, media's penchant for sensationalizing even the most drab story is very well-known but in Tharoor's case, Twitter seems to be a recurring factor. Twitter is just another platform, if at all Shashi Tharoor's statements were objectionable, they could have been made anywhere! In fact, it is Tharoor's questioning of the Home Ministry's visa restriction policy that has stirred this controversy, why is "Twitter" emphasized and hyphenated with Tharoor on all news channels and print media ?
This may be because the media and the government both have issues with a Minister of State airing his views on an open forum. Had he given the same statement to a handful of reporters, these very words might have sounded "refreshing"and the media could have hailed him but to devoid the media agencies from raking the moolahs is not something the latter can forgive or overlook. No wonder, at least one notable journalist, who also heads a television channel has gone on record criticizing the Minister for his twittering ways. Ironically, he himself did it on Twitter.
Apparently the government in general and Shashi Tharoor's boss and the Home Ministry in particular are not at all happy. It is not about going against own government, Tharoor as the Minister of State for External Affairs was merely cautioning against implementation of a stricter visa policy which were not taken well by several important countries. As such he was doing his job but what has annoyed a lot of people is the platform he chose. According to them, governmental policies are too sacrosanct to be even exposed to common folks' perception.
What does a career diplomat like Shashi Tharoor know on foreign policy making ? India is a democracy but that should be restricted to voting only! Once the ballot has been cast and a government is in place the people should go back to their toils leaving things like laws and policies solely in the discretion of the on the ruling elite, of course they can later be used during future electoral campaigns but till then the public have no right to know anything about the policies, at least not from the minister himself ! http://twitter.com/ShashiTharoor/status/7064122644
Iranian Cyber Army hacking and defacing Twitter may be part of a broader strategy of the Iranian government and military to control the flow of information from its own territories as well as information directed at it from external sources.This is the contention of a Techcrunch article which has also been published in Washington Post.
If you are an active Social Web user then you must already know about the role Twitter played during the post-election turmoil in Iran. Not only was it the main service for communication among the protesters and the primary source of news coming out from Iran but it was also the platform on which a major social media campaign was launched to mobilize public opinion against the Iranian regime. Although,it was supposed to be a campaign by Iranians anti- government protesters, the West's involvement was quite conspicuous. As a matter of fact US administration intervened and Twitter rescheduled its maintenance downtime in view of the volatile conditions in Iran. I had posted my observations on this development in one of my previous blog entry, please check out (Tweeting a revolution or is it a black operation ?). This campaign was seen by Iran as an attempt by the West to exploit political turmoil in the region to destabilize the state. Thus, this latest attack and defacement can be seen as a retaliation.
However, the Techcrunch article goes on to hint that the attack may have been launched as part of a much larger plan! Apparently, Iran has on Friday said that it is creating more efficient centrifuges that can be used in its nuclear plan by 2011. This and other reports like Iraq accusing Iranian forces infiltrating into its territory are being seen as part of a larger diplomatic offensive ahead of the negotiations on Iran's nuclear program. The cyber attack on Twitter as well as some other anti-government sites could be politically motivated to send a message to the West that Iran is capable of engaging the adversary in cyber warfare too. This message would sound far more ominous when we look at the conflict from the prism of asymmetric warfare.
Only time can tell how accurate this speculation is, but i myself have little doubt that the internet is fast becoming an arena of political games; games that go beyond mere propaganda campaigns,crowdsourced diplomacy to system disruption through Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. In one of my earlier posts (Is Cyber-Warfare On Social Web same as Terrorism ) i have discussed how politically motivated attacks and nation-states conflicts spilling over to the internet are affecting the common users, this could be another instance of it. However, it is not really clear if this group called Iranian Cyber Army is indeed a government supported group or just another group of nationalistic individuals acting on their own accord but with the tacit approval of the Iranian government. The flaw in the argument is that an hitherto unknown group of hackers, taking down Twitter may hardly procure any bargaining power for the Iranian regime! No doubt Iran is actively pursuing its nuclear program as well as cyber-warfare capability, but why should the US and EU concede any ground to it because it could take down a popular micro-blogging site ? From another perspective, it is quite possible that this news report may be part of the social media campaign against the Iranian regime that has been going for quite sometime.
Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p
Was i surprised? Not at all! This is not the first time that the micro-blogging site has gone down, since past few months,outages have become a regular affair and most likely will continue for a while. No! I don't mean to say that the guys at Twitter are not smart enough, indeed, it would be foolish to say that for guys who came up with such a brilliant concept such as Twitter. The only speculation that can be made is the probability that the issue lies deeper than it seems to us.
Outages are not specific to Twitter alone, most popular services including Google, Gmail and Facebook have had their blues too. It is an irony of fate that the very participatory nature of the Social Web is also the factor that takes it down often. For instance, the Internet traffic generated by Michael Jackson's death was much more than the servers were prepared for; it seems that most of the people in the world decided to use the Web to find more information about MJ, unprecedented numbers of requests coming in was interpreted as a DDoS attack by Google which then went into emergency mode. However, other Social Web sites such as Facebook, Friendfeed, MySpace and Twitter of course are far more open, consequently they could not balance the load and crashed.
So couldn't they build the service keeping load balancing in mind? This question is complex too, the Web is evolving at such a rapid pace that it is no longer possible to follow the traditional model where even the tiniest detail has gone through analysis and validation before the development has actually begun. Most of the popular service providers of the day are widely used for features some of which had not even been foreseen when the service was built for the first time. Adding newer features to existing applications is a continuous process that is conceived of and implemented in response to changing paradigms. Quick adaptation and innovation-on-demand is what drove their growth and has enabled them to change the way we use the Internet now.
Keeping the above scenario in mind, it is easier to understand why Web 2.0 websites often face scalability issues. Most of them had started up targeting a small segment of users, with plans to upscale operations on a future date. But as the service becomes popular and the user base increases exponentially,
too many requests lead to bottlenecks that make the system defunct for a period of time. There are technical reasons of course, I have come across quite a large number of papers blaming Ruby on Rails, the framework on which Twitter was built. This aspect cannot be refuted absolutely when one considers the fact that this framework has not been proven on large-scale application development. Facebook has addressed this issue by migrating the background code, it also has a limit on the number of friends a user can add. But there has to be something more than the weakness of the development framework.
One of the reasons that i love Twitter for is the fact that there is no restrictions apart from the 140 characters per tweet limit and the model itself. Unlike IMs or Social Networks, Twitter delivers messages from multiple users to multiple users. This makes every user a center of information propagation or many-to-many messaging system yet the server remains centralized, so as the number of users increase the processes increase exponentially since every user follows an unspecified number of users and is in turn followed by other users. i am not aware of the business logic or algorithm used by it but can understand that it must be efficient enough to handle all those transaction most of the time. However, the frequent outages suggest that something at the fundamental layer needs a re-look at.
As i said in the beginning i do not have a Google Wave account yet but from what i have read and seen in the Developer Conference preview video, the architecture is more inclined towards being a distributed one rather than being centralized. i wonder if the folks at Twitter have looked in that direction, if the server is unable to handle the load now, waves of users are just starting to migrate to Twitter. Read: Has Cattlegate Opened The Floodgate?
Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/
P.S.: Inviting my friend netgenre to write a guest article on data marshaling in the above context
Update
Recently i came across (through Twitter, of course) a excellent article at High Scalability which offers to explain the different factors responsible for the scalability issue of most social media sites. i found the part on Pull-on-Demand vs Push-on-Demand approaches quite interesting. In the first approach, which is followed by Facebook ( according to the same article), the service queries all your friends,fetches their updates and changes and provides them to you at one place. So if you have 1000 friends, it makes 1000 queries to show your friends update. So with every new user or even connection the number of queries to execute rises exponentially.
In contrast, Push-on-Demand approach deals with updates in a different manner. Rather than waiting for queries,.it pushes the data to friends right when it is changed! The user no longer needs to pull data, since it is already there when s/he logs in. Of course this model is not without drawbacks but that is beyond the current scope.
But more importantly, which model does Twitter use ?
i am not sure, but most likely it uses a hybrid of both model...Just a guess right now ;)
Picking up the thread from the last post, I will try to demystify the basics of Twitter for the benefit of the complete N00B. Here is how twitter works and the meanings of the terms that baffle you the first time you start using it.
Twitter Jargon
Tweet - The only question that drives Twitter is "What are you doing?" and a Tweet is a response to that question. If you are into social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut or even a Skype or GTalk user, you must already know what the status message means. But unlike the other services, the status message on Twitter i.e. the Tweet is not a passive message but the medium of communication or the counter-part of the IM you send to your chat buddy. However, a Tweet is generally visible universally unless, of course you have blocked a person. A Tweet can be of 140 character length only, which could be one of the reasons why Tweets travel faster than anything else i know of.
Handle - Username, this is important as it is likely to become your identity on Twitter, for example my Twitter handle is danishctc. You can find my profile on twitter by simply typing http://twitter.com/danishctc in the location bar or your browser. You can also reply me or mention it by simply prefixing my handle with the @ (at) symbol : @danishctc
DP - Stands for display picture or avatar. It is highly recommended that you put up your own picture as DP.
RT: Retweet is nothing but the same tweet being posted again by another user. There could be many reasons for doing this but the most common ones are- the person liked the particular tweet and would like to share it with her/his followers and the original Tweet is kept to make sure that the response is seen in the context. To retweet, you can copy the whole tweet along with the original tweeterer's handle (prefix the @ (at) symbol to the handle ) and type RT right at the beginning. (Most clients make this easy, explained here just to make sure)
Screenshot of my convo with de3p , pushkarbhatt Replies/Mentions: these are tweets by other users who have either replied,addressed or mentioned your handle. A handle prefixed by @(at) symbol is treated by Twitter as a tweet meant for that particular person and shows up on his timeline; for example- "danishctc: @anandmisra hi"
DM: Direct message, visible only to the recipient. Normally, all clients have a functionality to let you send direct messages to your friends but you can send dm by simply typing the character D before the handle.
Example: "danishctc: D anandmisra this a dm"
Friends - Twitter is people-driven, if you want to harness its power then you have to follow people whose updates you would want see. You could start following people in the suggested list that Twitter displays when you sign up or celebrities you already know ( for example Shashi Tharoor, Celina Jaitly, Gul Panag) but it is important that you find other like-minded users to make your tweeting productive. As with so many services, Twitter can also import your contact list from other accounts and suggest your pre-existing contacts that are already on Twitter. To follow them you can go to their profile page and click on the link "Follow" (Note: Following a large number of people in a very short time is seen suspiciously by Twitter since spam bots seem to follow a similar pattern, trying interacting as much as possible )
Followers - These are people who are following your updates. They are important from your point of view since they are your main audience as well as customer-base.
Favorites- If you find a particular tweet interesting and dont want to lose it in the melee, you can add it to your favorites. To add a Tweet to favorites, click on the star icon, the Tweet can now be found in the favorite section of your Twitter profile.
One of the major advantages of Twitter is the fact that it is not limited to a single client, single domain or even single device. I prefer tweeting from mobile rather than the desktop.
The original interface for interaction was Twitter.com and continues to be so since that is where you manage your account and set preferences. This is also the site you should be using if you are a new user.However, this interface lacks certain features for more advanced users but this is aptly compensated by numerous third-party clients.
Clients- There are plenty of clients avaible, download the one which meets your expection. On desktop/laptop, i find Tweetdeck the best, followed by Twhirl andSeesmic. Firefox add-on, Twitter Fox is another client that i find myself using a lot. On mobile (i use Nokia N95 8GB), Gravitycomes across as the client with best features but i have also usedFring and Twibble for tweeting.
There also some very cool web-based clients that you should check out: http://dabr.co.uk and http://slandr.com
Update - Thanks to Softykid for reminding me about Snaptu, a mobile client that i had heard a lot about yet never got to installing it. But now that i have done it, it is strongly recommended that you try it out :)
P.S.: Thats it for now, hope someone finds it useful coz i didn't get much pleasure compiling it! not my kinda thing ;)
Holy Cow! Shashi Tharoor's single tweet has taken Twitter to every nook and corner of India. Now, even the most obstinate bull squatting in the middle of the vegetable market wants to know what Twitter is all about. Of course the cows let loose by their owners to graze in Indian streets are equally curious even if they are not mooing it. Indeed, a lot of people are signing up on Twitter, a vast number intend to do it in near future. But I am a bit skeptical, if most of the people have an understanding on what Twitter is and how it should be used.
There some facts and opinions that I should mention before proceeding further. I think all Internet users who are not on Twitter can be broadly categorized into 3 categories. The first category includes people who use the Web minimally, their professional as well as personal agenda doesn't allow them to explore the social aspect of Web. As such the whole social media debate is irrelevant to them, at times they are indistinguishable from machines .
Then there are people who think Twitter is just another way of wasting one's time that could be utilized for creating artificial intelligence or achieve major breakthrough in stem cell research. However, you won't find them doing either, instead, you can find them participating in Orkut. Socialization, interaction, collaboration to them means going through photo-albums of this cute chick they came across in the friend list of another friend's friend. The main activity would include sending persistent add requests, leaving flashy images,ASCII art or corny scraps in Hinglish or broken English or do stuff that require little or no intellect. People belonging to this category, who think that the phenomenal growth of twitter userbase, eminent personalities and biggest organizations and almost every website extending tweeting functionality, is because of a social media hype and
who are convinced that Twitter is a waste of time should strictly continue with Orkut, Twitter would be an incompatible medium since the latter requires intellect!
However, there is the third category of users who do not doubt the utility of Twitter but are still not using it because they don't fully understand it or it has not worked for them. Indeed,there is not a single social website that one can join up and start enjoying or get results from day one. How effective social networking sites turn out depends on how well the user has created her network. This is especially true with Twitter since there are no photo albums of users, no social games or "which movie character you are" quizzes (well, there are mechanisms to share images, files etc but they are not integral part of the architecture.) . In other words, your experience on Twitter depends totally upon how you interact with other users (Tweeps). If used properly, it opens a completely new world of options, from real-time news to reaching out to targeting customers/audience and getting the most relevant answer to your questions. The potential is immense! In my follow-up post, I will try to compose a guide for beginners.
Every time i see @shashitharoor defending his tweeting habit on TV i can detect a gleam in his eyes which betrays a feeling of incredulity within him. WTF?! They seem to say, shouldn't his government be grateful that he is connecting it to nearly a hundred thousand people? One could say that may be Tharoor's long stint at UN has made him forget the epitome of doldrums that our babudom is, but that wont be the whole truth. Managements in most large organizations world wide are scared of new things (and for good reasons too) but that's part of the larger social media debate, this post is about the Shashi Tharoor question and about Twitter.
Shouldn't a democracy like India support transparency as the UK does, for instance, Tharoor asks. The penetration of Internet technology in India has not been deep enough to become part of our lives as it has been with the American and the British. India may be emerging as a software giant, but the majority of Indians, including those belonging to the IT workforce view the Internet as an unreliable medium. True, everyone right from the governmental departments to the small-time trader use the Internet for things like e-mails and correspondence, online booking and shopping and propaganda. But these are traditional tasks that the Internet makes easier, they don't harness the real power of the Internet.
The real beneficiary of the Internet have been those who have been able to leverage its powers. Let us not forget that there has been a major paradigm shift in the architecture and usage pattern of the Internet. It now goes by the moniker, Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly opines that a significant characteristic of Web 2.0 is the fact that businesses are embracing the web as a platform by building applications and services keeping the features of the Internet in mind instead of expecting the Internet to transform itself to suit traditional models!
Yet, a large section of the literate Indian population still consider the Web as something that should be used strictly in a manner that keeps the user insulated from the other users.
In the early days of the Internet revolution, anonymity was a major factor which encouraged participation and for good reasons too. But Web 2.0 revolution has changed all that, users now are not only using real identity but are also trying to put up as much info about themselves as possible. Discussing the various aspects of the changing user behavior is beyond the scope of this post, the point i wish to drive is that if anonymity was the flavor of Web 1.0, trust and transparency are the pillars of Web 2.0.
Lets take Wikipedia as an example, a reference site that can be modified by anyone with access to the Internet! A decade back, the majority of people would have scoffed at the idea. Indeed, Wikipedia was not an instant hit, it came out as a winner with the passage of time. But Wikipedia introduced the idea of radical trust which went on to become one of the distinctive features of the Web 2.0 meme. Almost, every successful Web 2.0 enterprise has been based a collaborative platforms that believe in actively engaging with the consumers and using the feedback to offer far more customized services/products the consumers.
For Indian democracy, this a great opportunity for interacting better with the people. The incumbent governments stand to gain the most by connecting to the voters directly, redressing most problems would be an impossible task but letting the people take a glimpse of the working of the government can actually instill much greater confidence of the people in the government. In fact, the opportunities are immense, if the Ministers, bureaucrats and legislators are willing to come of the time warp and connect to the people. Instead of trying to discourage Shashi Tharoor, they should actually be encouraging other Ministers and spokespersons (as well as issuing- DOs and DONTs lists) to use the power of the Web 2.0 to strengthen democracy.
If you are a web user then you must already know that some of the most popular social web sites including Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal and even Friendfeed were taken down this week by miscreants. It is perhaps one of the largest co-ordinated DDoS attack since the attack was launched simultaneously on Twitter, Facebook and other popular social media sites. As a consequence Twitter was down for several hours outraging users like me addicted to Twitter. Even a day later the micro-blogging service was running slow and had major connectivity issue with clients. It is not surprising at all, Twitter already has an inherent scalability issue, its far more vulnerable to denial of service attacks.
A typical DoS a(Denial of Service) attack is one of the oldest techniques cyber criminals employ to cause damage to sites. The technique is wickedly simple, a large number of requests are sent to the victim server which, it is unable to handle and thus crashes or slows down considerably. Often this technique has been successful but compared to this the DDoS is far too powerful. In DDoS (Distrbuted Denial of Service) hundreds of thousands of computers are used to send data and flood the network, these computers may be in different parts of the world but all of them would have been infected with a malicious code that allows the attacker to remotely control these computers. A collection of hijacked computers is called a "botnet" which according to latest news are actually availabe for hire at a relatively cheap price.
Coming back to Twitter outage last Thursday, what is really alarming is the fact that it seems to be politically motivated with probable involvement of state-actors! Apparently this highly synchronised attack was not a random anarchist act, it was targeted at one individual, a Georgian blogger, going by the name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia), who had accounts on Twitter, Facebook,LiveJournal, Blogger and YouTube.[source] As is obvious, fingers have already been pointed at Russia, especially after the last years cyber-warfare between Russia and Georgia.
Only weeks back, there were reports of sustained Denial-of-Service attacks on US and South-Korean websites and most likely these are going to continue sporadically until it breaks out into bigger cyberwar or the political objective is met. Earlier, there have been politically motivated large-scale attacks against Eastonia in May 2007 , Ukraine and Lithunia besides the occasional but highly damaging attacks on US sites by Chinese hackers. China is reported to have been preparing for large-scale cyberwar. Of course, Jihadists can't be far behind! However, as with everything, the earliest politically motivated cyberwar involving DDoS was launched against Serbia under the auspicious of the US. Its another matter that, Serbians were equally successful in counter-attacking the NATO on cyberspace.
But as of yet, there hadn't been as big a collateral damage as has been the case in last weeks outage. The Social Web has become a very important political tool as we learnt very recently from Twitter's role during Iran elections and the massive protests later on. Indeed, web is quintessentially a democratic platform and we can expect far more political activism online but there is also the fear that the involvement of state-actors in disruption of what can be called "essential services on the web" is an alarming trend. If attack on civilians in real world is called terrorism and unacceptable in any manner, an attacks that disrupts Social Web cannot be considered any less than cyber-terrorism. May be we need global treaties or similar legislations to ensure that our social web lives are not held ransom by nation-states' military and intels, cybercriminals or cyberterrorists.
Update
A few hours back, Twitter came under another attack which disrupted the service for 30 minutes. At 12:17 P.M. PT Twitter confirmed the attack on its status blog.
Twitter has been down for more than 2 hours,the last tweets on my time-line reflect panic as one would expect from the passengers of a ship as it goes down with the waves! Well, i haven't got a Google Wave account yet, the analogy is partly coincidental :p
Also read : http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/22/twitter-at-scale-will-it-work/
For the past 24 hours #Iranelectionand hash tags related to Iranian election has been trending on Twitter . What it essentially means, (for those unfamiliar with Twitter) is that the election in Iran and its fallout are the most talked about topic on Twitter. We have already seen the profound impact 1 that Twitter has had on socio-political events in the past but this could be the biggest one considering the fact that the mainstream media was late in reporting the protests and has since been lagging behind the micro-blogging service. ( Please check out, Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter For News About Iran )
However, what really intrigues me is the question, whether the protest in Iran truly reflects the aspiration of the nation as a whole or is just a partisan struggle fueled by external powers. Once again the sources of most these news are either almost anonymous twitterers or those belonging to the opposition camp. The truth perhaps lies somewhere in between, the call for probe by AyotallahKhameini indicates it. Ironically, Ashton Kucher, who has the largest following in Twitter, has likened the issue to the controversy around G.W. Bush's electoral victory in 2000!
Either way it is Iran's internal issue, it is, after all, the only country in the region that has some sort of democracy (that has not been forced on). So why is the global social media so obsessed with Iranian election results ? I guess it has more to do with the fact that the West is not comfortable with the fact that a hardliner like Ahmadinejad came so close to defeat and still survive. Of course, i am just speculating that he survived but anyway, this was an opportunity that a lot of people would have hated to let go of. That would also explain why the opposition is on the street but euphemisms like "tweeting revolution", coming from American and West European "social media activists" seem to me part of propaganda warfare in the lines of black operations. Only this time the agenda has been outsourced to the crowd populating the social web. John Robb has in his earlier blog posts discussed various 4GW strategies and manoeuvres that the US could adopt to bring down Iran, some of the proposed ones have been black operations of these nature.
At this juncture ishould confess that i don't have much love for Ahmadinejad nor for the ruling elite of Iran, but i cannot deny the fact that he has considerable support from the Iranian electorate as the numerous pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations indicate. So all talks of freedom and democracy by activists on web sound hollow when one considers the fact that there was hardly any murmur of protest when China banned nearly all major web sites and services on the anniversary of the Tianmen massacre. Similarly, the torch-bearers of liberty and democracy were conspicuously silent when just few weeks back the Burmese junta filed fresh case against the famous Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San SuuKyi just days before her 13 year old detention was about to expire! As i have already mentioned what we are witnessing might well be a crowdsourced black operation, not unlike propaganda warfare except for the fact that in this instance its far too decentralized and viral in nature. The majority of the participants may actually have no clue about the underlying agenda if at all there is one !
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Lately I have come across the word "troll" being used extensively on the Web and especially on Twitter and to be honest, every time I come across it there is a bit of resentment in me. Internet trolls are almost as ancient creatures as their folk-lore counterparts are supposed to be but the perhaps the former needs to be redefined. But then trolling was once considered an art (even if a dark art) which required some sort of skill but the latest breed of trolls on Twitter are more like sociopaths with 0 IQ.
Replies/Mentions: these are tweets by other users who have either replied,addressed or mentioned your handle. A handle prefixed by @(at) symbol is treated by Twitter as a tweet meant for that particular person and shows up on his timeline; for example- "danishctc: @anandmisra hi"
