What’s in a Name?

Despite the fact that I have had my twitter account for over two years I’m still pretty low on the twitter curve. Let’s put it this way after more than two years of having the account I currently have a total of 47 updates to my credit. Truthfully I ignored twitter after getting the account until recently when I decided that it might be interesting to see what’s happening in the twitterverse. It did not take very long before I noticed that I get lots of tweets directed at me from people I don’t know. I just assumed that this was another example of the dangers of having a common name. I got on twitter early enough that I was not forced to use a name like “whatdoyoucallaguywithnonicknameswhenhisnameistaken” when I created the account. I was lucky enough to get a nice simple “davidmiller.”

I have long known that there are many David Millers around (such as the Mayor of Toronto – yet one more reason I should go visit there) and I assumed that I was getting tweets from people who assumed that “davidmiller” on twitter belonged to a David Miller that they knew. Finally today I noticed that more than half of the tweets directed at me from people who obviously don’t know me contained links from blip.fm – I know nothing about the site except that from the content of the tweets it is obviously oriented around listening to music. I finally got curious and asked the people who recently sent me blip related tweets why they were sending them. The answer I got was:

holyshadow@davidmiller cause they have integrated twitter and blip, and since you have the same nick, you receive the blips on twitter. that answers?

So now I know why I may be the only person on twitter who has blocked more people than he follows (blocking people means that I don’t get informed every time they send a tweet my way) – due the the mashup nature of so many social networking services I am getting random tweets because some other David Miller has the same username on blip.fm as I have on twitter.com – I wonder if I can just block tweets that contain a url from blip?