Ng: Keeping track of tweets

IF YOU follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will notice that my status updates or tweets can be a little bit weird. It’s mostly a mix of observations, quotes that I read, or sometimes statistics that I am able to gather. It’s actually not for any readership but for myself. I am still hoping that I want to continue to be actively writing and I want to collect tidbits of wisdom or information that I can use in the future.

But how do I get a copy of all my tweets? It is actually relatively easy and not only your tweets but tweets of people you may want to follow, like Obama for example. All you do is to go to www.allmytweets.net and you only have to input the Twitter name (even if you don’t know the password) and the website will give you 3,200 of the latest tweets of that person (including yours if you ask for it). This is an easy way to retrieve probably the thoughts of one person or, for instance, all the news updates of a certain news agency.

I would like to share with you an interesting news that I recently read. It’s about a programmer working for a multinational company in the US. What makes it amusing is that this guy decided to outsource his work to a company in China. So he was getting his salary, but he was doing nothing at all, just watching videos, while he was paying somebody in China about 20 percent of his salary to do all his programming work.

It would have been okay except he got a bit greedy. He started accepting freelance projects on the side and outsourcing that as well.

He would have been doing ok except that the company started to notice his VPN logs and find odd and consistent connection from Shenyang, China. Apparently, what he did was that he sent his authentication token to his worker in China and the person in China was using that to log into his account to do the work. After the company found that out, they started probing his computer and saw the correspondence and the invoices he had. That was when he got caught.

The company probably figured if the Chinese workers were so good, it was better that they hire them rather than their employees hiring the contractors and pocketing the difference. So the company will probably try to find an outsourcing company soon. Read about the full story in CNET.

(www.twitter.com/wilsonng)