does anyone know anything about Tubely social networking thing? i looked it up and now i know that it is a free video sharing etc etc. but it's the recurrent use of the word "adult" in all these articles that concerns me.

I never used Twitter because I knew very little about it. Maybe I'll try it in the future and get bored.

Been promoting sexy lingerie via Facebook and Twitter?

No - Of course, not. Think again

“I wonder what people are thinking of me right now?” said Matt Marquess, an employee at a public relations firm in San Francisco whose Twitter account was recently hijacked, showering his followers with messages that appeared to offer a $500 gift card to Victoria’s Secret.

Mr. Marquess was clueless about the offers until a professional acquaintance asked him about them via e-mail. Confused, he logged in to his account and noticed he had been promoting lingerie for five days.

“No one had said anything to me,” he said. “I thought, how long have I been Twittering about underwear?”

The humiliation sown by these attacks is just collateral damage. In most cases, the perpetrators are hoping to profit from the referral fees they get for directing people to sketchy e-commerce sites.

In other words, even the crooks are on social networks now — because millions of tightly connected potential victims are just waiting for them there.

Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link “sent” by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. (Mr. Marquess gamely concedes that his password at the time was “abc123.&rdquo …

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/technology/internet/14virus.html?_r=1&hp

370 Passwords You Shouldn’t (And Can’t) Use On Twitter

Their list actually contains only 366 passwords, because abc123, monkey, asdfgh, and password occur 2 times each. 

I registered as a Tweeter eons ago but have never actually twitted and have never had my inactivity reprimanded. What am I doing wrong?

What I am getting, though (and their frequency has now surpassed that of the penis enlargement ads), are messages telling me that total strangers are "following my tweets". Should I be worried about this? Are they a prelude to a new scam? Identity theft? Stalking? How are they doing it if I am not leaving any tweets to follow? Is there some way to call up a list of those who never yet tweeted? Should I be reassured by being only one of a hundred other non-tweeters?

Derek

No. Both Tweets and penis enlargement ads are very important.

"But here’s where I get a bit dubious:

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

“Need to know”? If you’re going to give examples of things that Twitter tells you that you “need to know,” you really need to do better than mention yet another in an endless series of Apple rumors. And even if you first hear about the Senate vote on health care via Twitter, how much longer would you have to wait to hear about it from some other source? Maybe half an hour, until it shows up on the New York Times home page? What does the immediacy of Twitter actually do for you in that situation?

Near the end of his piece, when Carr wants to demonstrate how “Twitter can flex some big muscles,” here’s his example: the morning after the attempted plane bombing in Detroit, someone tweeted from the Montreal airport, “New security rules for int’l flights into US. 1 bag, no electronics the ENTIRE flight, no getting up last hour of flight.” Carr then says, “imagine you or someone you loved was flying later that same day: Twitter might seem very useful.”

Really? That’s “flexing some big muscles”? if you were flying later that same day, this wouldn't even be enough lead time for you to finish that presentation you were planning to finish on the plane. There’s a case to be made for the value and importance of Twitter, but surely this ain’t it. The whole piece sounds like the self-justification of an addict. Maybe Carr needs to get away from Twitter for a while so he can think some long thoughts — long enough, anyway, to make a plausible case that he really is better off tweeting than thinking." http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2010/01/tweet-enthusiast.html

I was already convinced of that. My question was: What should I do about messages notifying me that yet another young girl is following my tweets? How can I establish some causality between that and my penis enlargement, for example? Should I disconnect my webcam? Or is photobucket.com to blame?

Derek