NasheBlog.com

I don't usually say things such as this openly but I realized I am not the only one: I have recently started using Twitter. I don't really have much of a strong reason for not doing so before now but I suppose its just that I did not see how Twitter could benefit me. As it turns out, Twitter is a very good marketing tool something that I did not appreciate before now. I started using Twitter when someone told me of the real time search. Eventually I created accounts for websites I manage so that I can periodically tweet any updates to the sites. Anyone interested to know whenever an update was made could follow that account plus any other announcements.

I have decided to play with the API a bit and see if there are any interesting things I can do. (I have been playing with the Facebook Stream in the past few weeks and will post my experiences shortly.)


Of course there is a lot of junk and spam on Twitter which can be annoying at times. Here is an excerpt of an article at readWriteWeb about Twitter that I found interesting:

Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.

Up to now, this blog has largely concentrated on some aspects of my thesis. You will not see too many other postings on other topics because I moved the blog and just decided to start afresh and not bring the other postings to this blog.

Usually, I just stay out of politics because I am not politically correct at times. People, at least the ones I talk to most of the time, usually ask about a subject not because they want to hear your honest opinion but because they just want you to reinforce their own. I am usually quick to catch this and will support the other side of the issue even when I agree with them in the first place. I do this just for the fun of it and also because arguing can lead someone to reveal their thought process and prejudices.

So this brings me to this: I was driving with a friend when a commercial about health care came up. The commercial was against health care and it tried to paint the picture that the government would not be able to run health care when they don't even run the post office efficiently. "If you are happy with the service at the post office, then you will be happy with the government running the health care system." Of course this is paraphrasing but the announcer said something of that effect.

My friend started going off on how the government cannot and should not run health care. And then as always the inevitable line of questioning comes: "Can you imagine the government running health care?" To be clear, I don't know much about the health care issue because I have not bothered to look into it. So given the information I had, I answered that yes I can imagine the government running the health care system. I told him that I was very happy with the post office. I live in a very small town and I have not had any problems at all with the post office. When I go to the post office, I have never had to wait in a long line. The most was probably 5 people ahead of me. I have been in longer lines at the bank and at the grocery store. The people who work at the post office are very friendly and I have no problems with the service.

Then the argument started: "So you are okay with the government raising taxes to pay for it." Of course that was not the point we were arguing about. The argument was whether the government could run health care. To him, the question was not whether the government could run health care. It was some other issues, with the possibility of raising taxes being the biggest of them as it turned out. In my case, I only used the available information to make the decision. Using the post office example that the commercial had posed, I concluded that yes the government could run health care because I was happy with my local post office. With more information, I may conclude differently. It lead to a few miles of silence.