Today’s Twitter Observation

I have already separated my Twitter into two accounts, one for professional use (@cphtest) and one for personal use (@chrishansenhome). This has worked moderately, and I use TweetDeck for the former and twhirl for the latter.

So now my observation is on tweeters, rather than Twitter. I had to unfollow and block someone yesterday because she was tweeting perhaps every five minutes or so. That doesn’t sound too bad: the BBC tweets more often than that. What is maddening is that she tweeted “facts” that were dodgy and trite sayings apropos of nothing.

The tweet that annoyed me was (paraphrasing): “The Canadian $2 bill shows the American flag flying over Parliament.” I found this rather incredible, and a few minutes with Snopes discovered (with pictorial evidence) that the claim was false. I tweeted her directly with the link to snopes and a suggestion that she might want to retract it. No answer.

Then the stream of tweets with old hackneyed sayings started. I had had enough by this time and unfollowed and banned her.

My point? If you’re going to tweet, for God’s sake, tweet something that people might want to hear, don’t tweet every 5 minutes with things that people have either already heard or aren’t interested in, and if you’re tweeting interesting facts, make sure that the facts are verifiable.

Otherwise, Twitter is a good way of keeping up with friends, talking in a lighthearted way about what’s happening to you and around you, and getting early tips on news about which you might want to find out more. It is not a form of Internet masturbation for your own pleasure.

Just sayin’.

2 Responses to “Today’s Twitter Observation”

  1. trawnapanda says:

    The Canadian $2 bill shows the American flag flying over Parliament

    my that IS old news – 20ish years, and (as Snopes pointed out to you) demonstrably false to anyone with either sharp eyes or a magnifying glass. The $2 bill is the least likely to be mistaken, too, since it’s the maple leaf flag. It would be an anachronism to put the maple leaf flag on the $5 or $10 – those show the old Centre Block of the Parliament buildings which is where Laurier ($5) and MacDonald ($10) served as PM. That building burned in 1916, and was replaced – with a taller central tower, known as the Peace Tower, dedicated in the 1920s in the aftermath of WWI. That’s still in place today, and the maple leaf flag flies from it daily.

    What you don’t see daily is the $2 bill, which was withdrawn in 1996 (yes, 14 years ago) when the $2 coin was introduced. So your annoying tweet was not only inaccurate, it was over a decade stale.

  2. trawnapanda says:

    after I posted the above, I was surfing through Wikipedia’s article on withdrawn Canadian bills, only to learn that the $2 coin was issued 1996 02 19 – fourteen years ago *tomorrow*. (cue the spooky coincidence music)

    The Royal Canadian Mint had been producing lots of $2 coins up to the release date, since of course they had to replace all of the existing $2 bills then in circulation. There were 375 million 1996 coins minted, and that number is still more than 60% of the toonies in circulation (there are $1.25 billion in $2 coins out thar, I see from mintage numbers)

    However, there are no flags – canajun or otherwise – on the $2 coin
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