This is a tale of geek kindness that will warm your heart. It also shows clearly that Twitter isn't a breeding ground for mouth-breathing idiots -- for that, you need to visit the YouTube comment threads.
David Pogue (the NYT tech journo) was testing out Google Voice, the search giant's new voicemail and SMS management service. To check out the text messaging features, he of course needed text messages and so turned to Twitter, sending a direct message out to a handful of selected followers (a direct message is a message with a D at the front, and it doesn't hit the main feed).
Instead of whittling down the message into the required 140 character maximum, Pogue split his message in two. Here is the second part:
Do you notice his rookie, 3AM mistake? That's right. No "D". Pogue panicked and sent out another tweet, this time asking for mercy. There's no way anybody would want 21,000 text messages to come flooding in.
The early responses were good. Twitterer Tom_Baker (Dr.Who?) replied “We’ve all made mistakes like that.” Pogue went to bed, presumably in a cold sweat and with his phone set to silent.
The morning result? Almost nothing. No calls, five messages sent before the follow-up request and one YouTube member who apparently texted thusly: "Haha, you tweeted your number… FAIL! :)"
Who said nerds aren't cool?
A Do-Over on Twitter [NYT]
Photo: tosha/Flickr
