I've just seen something in my Twitter stream that makes me fearful. Not in any real, drastic sense, but it gives me a sense of FFSitis nonetheless. It also made me think about privacy on Twitter, and what it means for relationship with our friends.

I've just been sent a spam message by a bot whose sole purpose was to send just me just that message. Not anyone else. Just me. Not that I'm being singled out for special treatment you understand, the name of the bot clearly denoted it was generated and given an account either by virtue of a clever piece of software that's circumvented Twitter's CAPTCHA, or created an account in a sweatshop where people are paid a pittance to destroy the Internet, slowly and with the poor grammarz.

We've already seen "games" (which aren't games, just in the same way that those paper fortune tellers we made as kids aren't really games) on Twitter, but in a way they're harder to avoid than the ones on Facebook. Because Facebook's privacy is a lot more granulated than Twitter's, you can cut out that part of a person that you find maddening - the part that somehow believes that inviting all their friends to play Pirates vs Aliens or whatever, will somehow make their lives better - and leave the bits you enjoy. Whereas if you block someone in anger because they've invited you to become mayor of an Arkansas backwater or asked you to read their every blog post - sometimes twice for each post - you'll lose the stuff you find interesting, enlightening or just friendly. (And yes, I did just tweet this post. *slap*.)

Twitter's simplicity makes it capable of great things, but that lack of granularity makes it vulnerable, and makes me ever more certain that there will be a replacement, one with the immediacy and flexibility of Twitter, but with tighter controls or better tagging. What form that'll take I have no idea, but I'm not convinced it's an add-on or another skin to the Twitter API.

And in time, that too will become susceptible to a bot that offers me a "free prize". I still haven't clicked the link in that tweet. Who knows, maybe it's an iPad and I've just missed out?

Nah. S'probly just porn.