Now here’s a bit of a dodgy discovery…
For reasons totally irrelevant to the point of this post (so I won’t go into them) I decided to create a Twitter account for myself.
Well, ok, I will go into the reasons…
All to do with my recent posts about Madeleine McCann. The initial two articles I’d written about the subject seemingly attracted a fair bit of interest, with a few people claiming they’d be interested in keeping track of my progress. So I thought it might be a good idea to have a Twitter account so that, if they wished, they could “follow me” thereby and thus be notified on the (rare) occasions when I may add something new to my writings about the McCann affair. Seemed like a good idea at least.
Now, I’m not a particular fan of Twitter. My reaction to it is a bit like my reaction to social networking sites… tried ‘em, don’t like ‘em, ditched ‘em. About the only one I’ve retained (if it can be called a social networking site) is the photo-sharing site Flickr (which is really good, incidentally). As for the rest. Pah! All a waste of time.
However, a couple of the communities I associate with use Twitter, as do one or two of my personal contacts, and it began to dawn on me that maybe this relative newcomer to the scene is a bit different.
So initially I set up a Twitter account with the nick “tawnews” for use on my… er… “alternative news”-related sites and stuff. Just to keep a few folk informed but, more importantly, enabling me to keep abreast of what some of my contacts were doing. All well and good. No problems.
Back to the present time then. So, finally deciding to set up a second “personal” Twitter account as it were, what do I find when I try to do it? I can’t! Cos my “nick’s” already in use!
Some toerag has already set up an account there using the nick “fotdmike”! Ok, I know there’s no copyright on nicknames… but I’m fairly widely known by that particular nick around the circles in which I move and, it has to be said, its not an “obvious” one. Not one I’d have thought that would occur to someone to use just off the top of their head sorta thing.
So, a little bit irritating, but not overly concerning. Not straight away at least.
But then I did a little bit of digging, and discovered that this mysterious “fotdmike” on Twitter has (with just one exception) followers that are identical to some of my own contacts. And that is worrying! For it suggests that someone at some point has tried to pretend they’re me!
Bloody cheek! (Bit daft as well, cos no-one in their right mind would really want to be me.)
Anyway, cutting a long story short, I haven’t a clue who this other “fotdmike” character on Twitter is. It certainly ain’t me, that’s for sure. So if any of my contacts are following them or whatever I’d… er… block them or something.
And just for the record, I now have two Twitter accounts… one under “tawnews“, and the second (and newest) under “fotdmike1“. And they’re definitely both me.
And if anyone’s got any doubts about any site or ‘net tool they come across that appears to be mine but may not be there are various ways of checking back with me personally, the best method probably being to use one of the webmail forms to be found either on my Flickr account or on my main site at Tilting at Windmills (on which domain this blog’s hosted incidentally).
And incidentally, should anyone manage to track this mysterious (and extremely suspect) second “fotdmike” down, see if he knows what “fotd” actually stands for! That’ll be a good test for the little bugger… find out if he’s done his homework properly or not. Heh heh.
