Readers who want to ask me any question and have it answered can comment on this post. I’ll be answering all questions on October 18!

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been reinvented many, many times. Seth Grahame-Smith added zombie revisions to it in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it’s also been retold in a Facebook version.

Now, there is a Twitter version of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Complete with @replies, #hashtags, and DMs, “Pride and Twitterverse” retells the classic tale of Lizzie Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in tweets of 140 characters or less!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve never actually come out and stated what my usernames are for various social networking sites, so I thought I would list the prominent ones all in one go. My LiveJournal account has friends only entries and crossposted entries from my blog, my Dreamwidth account will be sporadically updated with friends only entries once I get around to customizing my account, and my Twitter account is protected to avoid spambots.

Feel free to add/friend me at any of these social networking sites if you like!

• LiveJournal: eternitycrash
• Dreamwidth: disalarming
• Twitter: eternitycrash
• Last.fm: eternitycrash
• Etsy: disalarming

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Dear Fellow Tweeters,

For the love of God, please stop using your personal Twitter account(s) as vehicles to spam for businesses. Yeah, free MacBook Pros and iPod Touches are really appealing and everyone wants one. And okay, (most of) the tweets for the Moonfruit (#moonfruit) competition were creative and amusing. But the Moonfruit competition was just one of the many, many ones businesses are running on Twitter, and it’s getting really tiring to read my Twitter updates page and see tens of hundreds of the same @replies and #hashtags with nothing personal or interesting in the tweet.

@sensatlandsend said it best in one of her tweets:

This trend of regular people voluntarily using their Twitter accounts to spam for businesses is wrong in so many ways. [source]

I know I can always just unfollow those who use their Twitter accounts to spam on behalf of companies. But everyone I follow on Twitter I “know” in one way or another, whether it be through various online communities or friends I’ve made through this blog. I don’t want to unfollow friends because I do care and am interested in their non-spam tweets. It just makes me sad that even though people hate spam (who doesn’t?) they’re still willing to unwittingly spam for companies. Just because it’s people and not spambots doesn’t mean it isn’t any less spammy.

And don’t even get me started on the Namecheap trivia contests and all of the pointless drama it ensues every time a contest rolls around. (My hatred of those deserves its own entry, to be honest.)

P.S. Twitter is also not an IM client – no one cares to read loads of tweets between two people about a subject no one cares about. I’d complain about this more as it irritates me as much as the whole tweeting for businesses topic does, but Melissa already covered this in “5 Ways to Fail at Twitter.”

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I have friends from all over the world as a result of moving around different countries growing up. While I have lost touch with many of them, I manage to talk to most of them on a semi-regular basis thanks to various social networking sites, email, and other technologies. Still, it’s hard not to be with all the people I want to be with, but being able to keep in touch has helped a lot.

When I moved from Delaware, USA, to Perth, Australia, I was eleven, and the latest technological development was email. Not everyone I knew had email, and even less knew how to use it¹. Needless to say, I lost touch with all of my friends from Delaware. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve started reconnecting with them, mostly via Facebook. Most of my friends from high school in both Perth and Chicago use Facebook now (some are using Twitter as well), so that has been immensely helpful in keeping in touch with all my friends.

Facebook and email are what I usually use to keep in touch with my friends that live overseas. For my friends that live in the US, not only do I use Facebook and email, but I also make phone calls a lot as well as send texts. I am the champion of long phone calls, as Roanne can attest to, and I think that a phone call is the next best thing if you can’t see someone in person for a face-to-face conversation. And even though I’m not a fan of texting, if there’s a special circumstance with a particular individual, I’ll break all of my texting rules and happily text away to keep in touch².

Honestly, I don’t know what I would do without all of the various methods of keeping in touch that are available these days. As much as I love to travel, I still like maintaining a connection to all the places I’ve visited and all the people I’ve met, especially those that have had a big impact on my life. Even though I may get a little slack about keeping in touch from time to time, I strive to maintain contact with all of those that are important to me, regardless of distance. After all, since there are so many options of how to keep in touch nowadays, there’s almost no excuse not to!

1. Remember, my friends and I were eleven. And while eleven year olds are coding and such now, that wasn’t the case when I was that age! [↩]
2. I don’t go as far as send texts when I am in the middle of a conversation with someone else, though. I still think that’s ridiculously rude. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.