Twitter spam seems to raise our collective hackles more than any other kind of spam. I admit it: I whinge when I get Twitter spam.  But I observed last week, after engaging in such a whinge, that I’d never dream of doing the same every time I get email spam.  I’ve even asked here whether a particular behavior was Twitter spam¹.

Every time I get Twitter spam, I dutifully report it.  I’m never sure if it does any good, but I do it anyway.  Last week, Marco Arment commented on Twitter spam and motivation to report it, concluding that he’s not going to bother to report it any longer because it just seems like a waste of time.  I don’t share his assumption that Twitter isn’t doing anything (or isn’t doing enough), so I still report.  His post is one example of a perception that Twitter spam is a big problem, and that it’s only getting worse.

I don’t have numbers about Twitter spam, so I’m not sure whether it actually is a big problem, let alone one that’s getting worse.  The perception of the problem is one that I find fascinating.  Why is it that Twitter spam bothers us so much?  My theory² is that there are several aspects of it that, together, make it bloody obnoxious.

A lot of Twitter spam is keyword spam.  There are some keywords that are guaranteed to get you spam responses: iPad, iPhone, laptop, etc.  It’s really galling to know that I’m going to tweet something and be entirely (and often accurately) convinced that I’m going to get spammed in response.  Compare this to email spam: there’s no obvious link between my action and the spam.  The spam that I get in email has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever done, it’s just an indiscriminate firehose.  I’ve been getting a bunch of Viagra spam on my blog post about appearing on the Angry Mac Bastard podcast, but while I find that amusing, it’s probably coincidence.

Twitter spam is addressed directly to me, and mentions/replies to @nadyne are designed to get my attention.  They’re supposed to be so important that they get their own stream, and I never skip reading @nadyne references.  I’ve seen people get testy when there’s some kind of contest or promotion that asks people to tweet something, but that’s rare, and I haven’t observed the same level of vitriol about that behavior as I have for the usual Twitter spam.  Email spam, while it might be addressed directly to me, isn’t highlighted in the same way, it’s just part of my inbox.

I can’t really scan past Twitter spam because it’s identical to everything else.  When I read my email, I scan my inbox to see what I can immediately delete.  Email spam is often, although not always, obvious enough that I can just read the sender/subject and delete it without wasting any more attention on it.  On the other hand, Twitter spam is roughly identical to the rest of Twitter.  While I’m probably not devoting any more time to reading Twitter spam than I am reading the subject line of email spam, I don’t feel as annoyed by email spam because the time spent on the subject of the email is much less than the time that I’d spend actually reading the email.

Are there other aspects of Twitter spam that make it feel so much more obnoxious than other forms of spam?

As a researcher, I always get annoyed when I see the wanton abuse of data.  Mashable’s article Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male is a great example of data abuse.

The data abuse starts by reporting data without noting anything about the methodology behind it.  Data is meaningless if you don’t know how it was collected.  For this article, they report on two different websites which claim to have analyzed Google+ user profiles.  Neither of these websites say that they’ve looked at all of the profiles, and neither of them note what method they used to sample the profiles that they did analyze.

The data abuse continues by ignoring the major differences in the data that is returned by the two sites.  One says that 86.8% of sampled profiles are male, the other says that 73.7% are male.  What explains a delta of more than 10 points?  I can come up with possibilities, but I don’t know if any of my potential explanations are correct.  In the case of any of the possibilities, it would tell us a very different story.  For example, if the difference is one of time (that is, one set of data was collected earlier than the other), then we’d learn something about the early-adopter curve.  If the difference is one of sampling method, then we might learn about the relative strengths of each of those sampling methods for this type of dataset.

What really bothers me about this breathless repeating of such statistics is that there is no attempt at analysis.  If we accept that the current Google+ users skew male, is this any different than the usual early-adopter curve? Or the early-adopter curve for social media? Or the early-adopter curve for new Google applications?  Data without analysis is meaningless.  Reporting on the data suggests that we should care, that there is something different here.  But it appears that no-one has bothered to answer such basic questions about the data.

We can do better than this.  Let’s stop the blind reporting of data, and instead expend some effort on analyzing the data.

Back in the dark dark days of the Internet, there was a culture clash between Usenet and AOL over “me too”.  Now, in a social media age, “me too” has made its comeback: retweeting on Twitter, “like”ing on Facebook, +1ing on Google Plus.

Remember that culture clash?  Usenet culture had a strict etiquette, coining “netiquette” to describe it.  Netiquette was largely about saving bandwidth in the days of slow and limited dial-up access.  Read the FAQ, don’t spam, trim replies to only include relevant text, make replies meaningful.  AOL users, when first let loose out of their walled garden in the mid-90s, didn’t respect that netiquette.  The calling card of an AOL user¹ was adding “me too!” to a thread.  In nicer forums, this led to a gentle primer in netiquette, but it mostly led to the AOL user being flamed out of existence.

I admit that I was snobby about those AOL users in my Usenet days.  I failed to see the importance of “me too”.  “Me too” is an acknowledgement that not only did I hear you, but I agree with you.  It’s identifying a point of commonality, a shared point of interest.  No matter how much I want to believe I’m a special snowflake, I also want to have something in common with others.  I like learning that you read Terry Pratchett too², that you listen to Cowboy Junkies, that you think that flour+water is a great restaurant.

It’s only now that bandwidth is plentiful that “me too” has resurfaced.  The very human desire for connection is ever-present, and it’s now become acceptable in a social media world to acknowledge that need for connection in a lightweight fashion.  I don’t have to write an essay about why I love Pratchett’s novels, I can simply click a button and let you know that we have this point of commonality.

The pendulum has swung the other way.  15 years ago, I never would have imagined posting “me too”, no matter how strongly I felt that connection.  Compare that to a meeting I was in last week.  I was participating in a portfolio review of a candidate, and I asked a question contrasting one of the candidate’s statements with something they had said earlier.  The person sitting next to me looked up and said that he’d just jotted down a note that he wanted to explore that question more.  Further down the table, another interviewers raised his hand and said, “plus one”.  This prompted a couple of others to do the same.

While “me too” is important, there’s also a danger to it.  Our discourse shouldn’t be limited to simplistic statements of agreement that can be fully captured by the two characters of +1.  There are times when that essay about why I love Pratchett’s novels is not only welcome but needed.  Likewise, we need to be able to have a nuanced but respectful discussion about why we disagree on a topic.  We need to acknowledge our commonality, but such acknowledgement shouldn’t be the only communication.

It’s time for a new laptop bag.  My current laptop bag is a messenger bag that was a gift from my wonderful husband.  It’s starting to wear out.  I’ve been looking at laptop bags, and I haven’t found what I’m looking for.  So I turn to you, dear reader, in the hopes that you can help me out with laptop bag recommendations.  My requirements are as follows:

1. CANNOT USE VELCRO IN ANY WAY.  This is a strict requirement.  I want to be able to sneak into a conference room and not have the rrrrrrrrrrip of the velcro give away that I’m a few minutes late.  I hate velcro with a burning passion.
2. The main compartment should close fully, probably via zipper.  My laptop bag will get stuffed under airplane seats and otherwise treated poorly, and I want to minimize the risk of something falling out.
3. Must be able to hold a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
4. Additional pockets are nice.  My laptop bag is home to a MBP power adapter and a small bag of miscellaneous cables and adapters.  I also always carry a couple of pens, a small notebook, a granola bar or two, and a deck of cards.
5. When I’m on a business trip, my laptop bag is also usually my purse, so having a place to fit my wallet, keys, phone, and sunglasses is useful.  So is an easy-to-access external pocket to slide a boarding pass in.
6. Minimal branding.  I don’t wear clothing with visible brands¹, and I don’t want my laptop bag to have a lot of branding on it either.
7. Colors.  There are enough boring black laptop bag in the world, mine shouldn’t be one of them.  A laptop bag should have personality.

So: what ideas do you have, dear readers?  I’m open to either a messenger bag (although that first item removes many of them from consideration) or a backpack, or something else if it looks good.

A couple of months ago, I purchased a deal from Plum District for flowers from From You Flowers¹.  The deal came just when I was trying to figure out what to send to my mother for Mother’s Day, so I decided that this was a sign from the universe that my mother needed flowers.  Once I got the voucher, I went straight to the From You Flowers site to select a bouquet.  They offered delivery on Mother’s Day.  I ended up paying about $30 over the cost of the original Plum District voucher, which was fine by me.

Then Mother’s Day arrived, but the flowers didn’t.  Thanks, guys, for making me look like a bad daughter who forgot about Mother’s Day.  I wrote to both From You Flowers and Plum District the next day to enquire about the missed delivery.  The flowers arrived later that day.

In response to my mail enquiring about the missed flower delivery, Plum District apologized profusely.  They even noted that they’d seen my tweet on Mother’s Day about it.  They offered me both a refund of my original voucher purchase and a $10 credit on my account.

From You Flowers, on the other hand, took a different approach.  They noted that the florist was unable to make all of the requested Mother’s Day deliveries, and said that the driver was supposed to have apologized to my mother for the late delivery.  Now, I get that Mother’s Day has got to be a very busy time for florist.   But I ordered a week in advance, and they offered the Mother’s Day delivery.  They should know how many deliveries they can handle, and not accept more orders than that.  I know I’ve called florists in the past and had them tell me that they didn’t have a delivery available on the requested date.

What really annoyed me about this is that From You Flowers touts their “100% Satisfaction Guarantee” on their website.  Here it is:

From You Flowers, LLC offers a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. We strive to make your experience buying flowers online with us amazing. Whether you are looking for discount flowers, same day flower delivery, or cheap flowers we promise to ensure great quality, personable customer service and one-of-a-kind florist arranged bouquets.

If you are not satisfied with our service for any reason feel free to contact us. We will either refund your money or redeliver a new product. The choice is yours! Problems are rare, but when they occur From You Flowers is available 24 hours a day to help you.

It took a couple of emails where I quoted this policy to them, but they finally did issue a refund of (wait for it!) $3.43, 10% of the purchase price (not including the Plum District voucher).  They didn’t even refund the full cost of the delivery ($14.99) that they didn’t make on-time.  I didn’t realize that their statement that they would “refund your money” actually meant that they would issue a partial refund.

This experience shows an odd dichotomy between how the two sites handled the exact same issue.  Plum District, which doesn’t have a satisfaction guarantee² issued an instant refund and gave me a credit to boot.  From You Flowers, which does have a satisfaction guarantee, took more than a month to issue a $3 refund.  I wasn’t expecting anything from Plum District.  I don’t view it as their fault that the florist didn’t make its commitment.  I wrote to them to let them know that the florist hadn’t lived up to their end of the bargain, in case this is an issue that others experienced with the merchant.  On the other hand, I wasn’t expecting to get entirely blown off by From You Flowers.  I wasn’t expecting the full price of the flowers to get refunded (although I think that their satisfaction guarantee at least implies that it would be), but I did think that it was fair that they refund their delivery fee since they didn’t make the delivery on-time.

There’s several lessons learned here.  First and foremost is likely that I should’ve just called a florist in my mother’s town to order flowers directly instead of going through a middleman like From You Flowers.  I also should’ve done my homework on From You Flowers and discovered that their 100% satisfaction guarantee isn’t.  And finally, there’s the open question of whether using a deal website like Plum District really is a good idea for either the merchant or the buyer.  I have to give credit where it’s due and say that Plum District far exceeded my expectations in dealing with the problem, but perhaps the problem is one that’s bigger than this individual interaction.