Just a quick note on a story I'm looking into. I haven't yet confirmed this on Twitter's end, but it seems that the admins over there can label your tweets as "Anti-Social." Doing so removes your tweets from search results. It's an interesting solution to the eternal problem of ugliness on the Internet.

I'm going to stop by Twitter's offices tomorrow and try to get a comment. At present, I've found this other blog mentioning the "Anti-Social" effect. In that case, a genuinely offensive individual was harassing a few users, and got himself removed from Twitter's search results.

There are others, though, who are censored from Twitter search for less obvious reasons. The real net effect here is that the search results you get on Twitter are filtered through this "anti-social" colander. You can still see tweets referring to the username that has been deemed "anti-social," but you cannot see their tweets in search results.

Is this an egregious abridgement of free speech, or simple way of making Twitter less abrasive? One thing's for sure, there is no rhyme nor reason to what Twitter feeds are being deemed "anti-social," and that is the real source of concern here.

Megan Phelps, for example, is entirely searchable, despite her constant homophobic tweeting, while other users are filtered simply by reputation in other social media outlets. Of course, this all enters into the tricky area of what speech can be limited on public forums. And, for that matter, is filtering search results actually a limit on free speech?

We'll see what Twitter says tomorrow. The method of their filtration isn't necessarily a problem, but the vetting process for who and what gets censored could be troublesome. Anyone else out there have experience being filtered out of search results on Twitter?

I often find myself experiencing something in real life -- good or bad -- and immediately want to share it on my networks. I take out my iPhone and instantly share it with my networks. Depending on which "app" I open, I could share it with 720 people (many of whom I've never met), 350 people (many of whom I know in real life) or over 500 business associates. These networks define us, the generation that shares (my new definition of Gen Y), but how do you deal with this mentality when creating your applications? Do you ever think about "saving us" from ourselves? 

As I took my daily Starbucks run the other day (I mean, I am a classic example of Gen Y, what did you expect? Dunkin Donuts??), I began chatting with a co-worker about AIM profiles. Remember the days when the Internet was brought to you in a nice, localized, safe package? Remember the AOL homescreen and the friendly "you've got mail" notification? 

For many of us those days are gone, but all of the new technologies we use today have origins in these older systems. Our Facebook profile, my co-worker and I realized, is really just an extension of our masterfully designed AIM bios. The only difference is that there's a lot more on the line these days; these days we're sharing our actual name. 

Not many people used their real name for screennames or MySpace profiles back in the day, but today's society demands that we share that -- and a whole lot more. 

Thinking about this, I started to wonder -- how does privacy and security fit into a culture that is bent on sharing every little thing that happens to them during the day? How can developers save us from ourselves? Is that even a possibility? 

Of all the applications on my iPhone, I think the best example of this is my Chase bank application. I log in, it remembers my username but never my password, and then I check what I need to and close the app. All other apps that I do this with (Facebook, Twitter, AIM) stay logged in. Chase (after 15 mins or so) logs me out. Even if I opened the application again, I wouldn't be able to do anything without putting my password in. 

Do you incorporate bank level security into your consumer apps? Or do you think it is up to the consumer to protect him/her self? 

How will you connect privacy, security and sharing in 2012? Tell us! 

My son likes getting under the hood of his car, tweaking and tinkering.  I like getting under the hood of my computer and tinkering.  Just as my son likes to push the performance of his machine, I like pushing the performance of mine. 

Occasionally, my son will bump up against the limits of his knowledge, so he’ll come into the house, sit down at the dining room table, boot up the spare laptop, and start googling around.  Depending on the size of the problem, or what piece of machinery he’s working on, he can be engaged for hours.  Sometimes, he pulls out his phone and starts calling friends with expertise.  Not once in all the years he has been working on cars has anyone told him to get a Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Toyota, or etc. 

I also will occasionally bump into some esoteric little quirk of high-tech behavior that I have never seen before.  If I can’t find an answer on Google, sometimes I ask on Facebook.  I have over 4300 “friends” on Facebook, many of them are wizards.  Some are not. Inevitably, one of the non-wizards will say,  “You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac.”  And just as inevitably, I will unfriend that person.  It’s not like I don’t warn them ahead of time—but they say it anyway.  It’s the cyberspace version of Tourette Syndrome.

Actually, they're right. If I had a Mac, I wouldn't be having that problem—but I also wouldn't be running a state-of-the-art machine either.  Inside my custom case lurks a Sandy Bridge motherboard, an i7-2600K running at 3.40ghz, 16gb of RAM, a 240gb SSD for the OS, and 6TB of onboard storage—so when I'm trying to change a tire on my Ferrari, I don't want to be told I'd be better off with a Lexus. I wouldn't. The Lexus is very pretty. It’ll get you to the grocery store and the movie theater and the mall.  But it won’t get you the other guy’s pink slip at the track. 

100 years ago, and if someone driving a horseless carriage had to stop to change a tire, passersby would yell "get a horse." The "get a Mac" remark is the 21^st century equivalent.  It’s thoughtless.  It’s stupid.  It’s rude.  It’s what falls out of the mouth of someone who has nothing useful to say, but has to say something anyway. 

The remark doesn’t address the problem I'm trying to solve—it simply asserts that I’ve been wrong in all my choices.  It’s no different than a bible-thumper insisting that I’m going to Hell unless I accept Jesus as my savior. The remark is an arrogant assertion that my years of expertise in the x86 architecture has been wasted, and that my decades of investment in high-end hardware and software is immediately inferior to an overpriced and underpowered exercise in style that offers me significantly fewer options, almost no opportunities to get under the hood to tinker, and a much smaller menu of available games and applications. 

I don’t want to join iCult.  I see no advantage in living in a "walled garden" controlled by a corporation that has proven itself more interested in serving its own needs than mine.

Friends don’t tell friends to get a Mac.  So if you tell me that, I will unfriend you.  Honest.  (Unless you’re a redhead who owns a chocolate store. But that’s the only exception.)

Twitter is rife with fun people to follow, especially if you like software development and a good laugh. Here are a few Twitter feeds, serious and otherwise, that you should be following:

• DevOps Borat - Humorous advice and info from everyone's favorite Khazakstani DevOps guy. Very Nice!
• Paul Graham -Founder of YCombinator.
• Hacker News Tips - Meant to be funny. Constantly ragging on NoSQLs.
• SD Times Twitter feed!
• Jim Jagielski - Mr. Apache, himself.
• Jenkins CI - The official Jenkins (formerly Hudson) twitter feed.
• Jason van Zyl - Creator of Maven.
• Alan Zeichick - Our fearless leader!
• Sam Ramji - Of Apigee and formerly Microsoft fame.
• Mark R. Hinkle - VP of community at Cloud.com
• JDuck - Always has his finger on the immediate pulse of security.
• William Gibson - Of Neuromancer fame.