Cunning spammers on Twitter?

Today I had yet another "follower" on my Twitter account. Someone who I'd never heard off, in a line of business that I have no interest in etc.

Sure enough their following vs follower count was up around 1,000 to 50.

Being an IT type person, I try to look for patterns for such things. I notice that this particular individual had the bulk of their posts listed as being sent using something called Seesmic.

According to their website, the Seesmic catch phrase is "Build your community. Given that the first sentence on their home page is, "A desktop client to manage your lifestream from Facebook & multiple Twitter accounts", I'm picking that they could be helping people to spam via social networks.

The words that raise a red flag for me are multiple Twitter accounts.

If you're using Twitter to follow people and organisations then 1,000 would seem a bit excessive a number to be acvtively following.

Advantages of the London lifestyle

I'm getting accustomed to carrying a technical book with me on my tube ride to and from work.

I've never been a speed reader, so it's good to have half an hour or so at each end of the day where there isn't much else that I can usefully be doing.

One of the books that I am currently reading is Refactoring To Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky. It's part of the Martin Fowler signature series.

Today I jumped ahead to read the Replace Conditional Dispatcher With Command section, as some code that I have been looking at recently could be a good candidate for this type of simplication. So far it looks like a more robust solution to what the original developers were trying to achieve, so I may add this to the maintenance roadmap.