
Why would you trust Twitter? - zoowar
http://interi.org/2011/02/why-would-you-trust-twitter/
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saurik
I just posted a comment on the blog, but given that it is "awaiting
moderation" and for all I know won't post (and I like using HN to keep track
of my comments a lot more anyway), I'm cross-posting it here:

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“”"I get everything that Twitter offers, but with multiple layers of benefits
that a Twitter user doesn’t even understand they are not getting.”"”

^ And, to be clear, normal end users don’t understand that they are not
getting these benefits not because they don’t realize that’s possible, but
because they don’t actually consider these to be benefits.

I mean, I’m right there with you: I refuse to use services like Gmail, and
self host my own e-mail. I DO NOT trust Google, and often find myself wanting
to do subtle things that Google doesn’t really support.

(I mean, e-mail is great and decentralized and all, and you can buffer the
pain by using your own hostnames that you can switch off to other providers,
but in the mean time they still are indexing all of your e-mail for marketing
purposes and unless you are constantly backing it up /have your data/, which
is scary.)

Although, looking at your MX records (which are all google.com/googlemail.com)
I see that even your need for privacy and self-hosting only go so far, and you
/are/ willing to trust Google… so uhh… yeah. ;P

But most people, even me, stop caring at some point. I do /not/ purchase
bandwidth to my office to run my own internally administered servers anymore,
for example. And, for most people, using Gmail or Twitter or anything else is
“just fine”.

As for how Twitter treats their “users”, UberTwitter is not their user, and
that understanding that they, in fact, did not “cut off” any users: they
disabled a single client that doesn’t seem to understand that calling their
product “UberTwitter” was downright egregious.

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ruethewhirled
what is this? an advertisement for StatusNet?

~~~
riffic
if anything it's an advertisement for OStatus, the successor protocol to
OpenMicroBlogging. This protocol allows anyone to run their own tweetish site
on their own, and allows for decentralized, federated communication.

StatusNet is a self-hosted solution, so you basically can run it as you see
fit on your own. It is licensed under AGPL terms so you know what exactly your
service is doing.

