For most Twitter is a fantastic communication tool.  The way in which any one can follow anyone else and follow their stream of Tweets is exactly what makes Twitter the success that it is.  Unfortunately this level of openness is not without it’s pit falls.

I’ve been following @KirstieMAllsopp for a while now, in case you don’t know who Kirstie is she is British TV presenter and property guru.  After reading a few of her messages, it became clear that Kirstie and other famous celebrity tweeters are the victims of an Internet bullying campaign.

The bullies themselves don’t see that their words are bullying but by the very definition of what cyber bullying is, they are.  Now I won’t link to any of their accounts here because it’ll just give them some sick perversion and draw attention to them directly.

However Kirstie was unable to block them at the time from the mobile website of Twitter and had to wait until she could, consequently a number of people replied to Kirstie offering kind words of support only to have the bullies turn on them and flood their @mentions feed with abuse.

I too have had these messages sent to me and I’ll post a few examples now (self censored so as not to offend)

@KirstieMAllsopp f***** block me will ya ya fat do goody scrubber. Yer programme is s*** and ur fat nd ugly lol

@twbrit u think u r so f****** clever e mailing that fat bird off telly well keep ur f***** thoughts to yerself bout my mates or Ill ave u

@richardhyland if u bad mouth @****** or @********* gin u 4 eyed gimp Ill f****** kick ur chav arse this will be ur only warning c***

And that was just three of around 30 tweets from one of these users in around 30 minutes!

Others included

@KirstieMAllsopp fat s*** (via @******) this one is trying to ban you all @****** She is a seriously obese dull bitch

@KirstieMAllsopp kirstie, where on your body is the perfect location for me to s***? your chest? your hair? your eyes?

I think any sane person will agree it’s pretty foul stuff and whilst most adults swear at some point, there is simply no excuse or point in their sad little tweets apart from upsetting normal people using a great service like Twitter.

Twitter do provide a method of feedback to harassment, yet a week after this came to my attention, every single one of the accounts is still active.  Is Twitter unable or unwilling to do something about it?

Celebrities have often had to put up with a lot because of their fame, paparazzi, untrue stories, but no one deserves to be abused or bullied in this way whether it be online or in person.

Update: Since I posted this, one of the accounts has now gone, I don’t think it was suspended but the user either deleted it or changed his screen name

Update II: Two down now… hopefully more to come

Simply genius

So I’ve been following the developments of Opera vs Microsoft vs the EU browser war and as far as I understand it this is what’s happened so far

1) The EU has been concerned for sometime that Microsoft has bundled Internet Explorer and wants it removed as a default installation

2) Opera has complained to the EU as well

3) Microsoft has developed a special version of Windows 7 just for the EU which doesn’t have Internet Explorer installed

Now could someone just explain to me for a minute, if the web browser is not installed by default, how the hell are you supposed to get a web browser running without installing IE from the Windows Disk. I don’t know about you but I don’t tend to keep a resource of Web browser installers lying around.

Next comes that, did anyone bother to ask users what they wanted? I didn’t get asked and I don’t really mind IE being installed… I’m not forced to use it and I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to. It’s not like Microsoft prevent you from installing other browsers.

Now I read this morning over at The Register that Microsoft have proposed a browser ballot screen when you install Windows asking you to pick which browser you want installed.  Apparently this is the mock up they provided.

To be honest, that screen seems perfectly fine to me, it’s clean, it’s relatively straight forward and offers the most popular browsers around.  Now of course you can’t realisically expect Microsoft to put every web browser in existence on the screen either, there are far too many, so who decides who makes the grade?

However I read in that same article that Opera are not happy with that either

Lie has reportly said that the use of icons in the ballot screen could result in a natural bias towards IE. The sticking point could be that the IE logo has become synonymous with Windows.

“The blue ‘e’ has become so associated with the Internet in general, due to the bundling with Windows. We think using the blue ‘e’ might not be such a good idea,” told TechFlash.

My only response is ‘Opera just stop moaning’. Just because your browser is rubbish and no one wants to use it doesn’t mean that you have to go out of your way to make things harder for users.  Heck, the Google logo there is highly recognisable so I’d imagine quite a number of users will actually click on that instead of IE.

I’m sure Opera won’t be happy until the screen says do you want to install Opera or if you want to install another click on the little button, type in the URL to a .exe for some other browser… oh and IE is now renamed to ‘FE£RG245wvf”%s TGE£%”V’

Indeed which Opera might have a higher Acid 3 rating than Internet Explorer I’d still rate IE8 above Opera in terms of a better product.   If I’d move the logos around in my personal preference I’d only move Internet Explorer and slot it in nicely between Google Chrome and Opera.

However when the next version of Windows comes out I don’t want to buy a cripled version from the EU, I’ll try to find a legal way of getting the US version thank you very much… much like the unused N versions without media player.