For Facebook, there’s sending friend requests, and for Google Plus, you add people to your circles. But as anyone who has a Twitter handle knows, on Twitter, we follow and we tweet at people.
Enter today’s #FollowFriday, or #FF. If you’ve been on Twitter and don’t know what this is, it’s a Friday standby where Twitter users recommend a list of accounts to others. For example, you might tweet, “#FF @itworldca @itbusinessca @compdealernews” to encourage your followers to follow these accounts, especially if you see value in their tweets.
This week we’ve found an eclectic mix of people including a Canadian federal agency CIO, the head of a Montreal security consultancy and a B.C. -based high speed network researcher.
I interviewed Eric Parent, president of Montreal’s Logicnet on Thursday about his company’s report that some 40,000 servers in Canada, France and Switzerland hadn’t been patched for the Heartbleed vulnerability a month after news broke around the world about the problem.
That study ended May 5; Logicnet is compiling a new one that will be released early in June to see how things have changed in the last four weeks.
IT WORLD CANADA – HEARTBLEED IN CANADAhttp://t.co/Rp0SYIgs4A
— Eric Parent (@ericparent) May 21, 2014
His tweets are almost always security-related.
Jacques Mailloux is the CIO of Elections Canada, which has been in the news recently with the Harper government’s controversial Fair Elections Act (C-23). Mailloux, of course, doesn’t comment on anything before Parliament but he does draw attention to a wide variety including the availability of Wi-Fi at Ottawa city hall, freedom of information in Australia and certain in-your-face IT marketing.
I'm not a saint. Nor am I a fan of NSFW publicity. I told the kids it stood for Why the Face? #NotADonDraperIdea pic.twitter.com/OuqsWuCuKD
— Jacques Mailloux (@IamJackMailloux) May 21, 2014
Finally, the University of Victoria’s Ian Gable was in the news this week as a technical leader on a team that demonstrated the transmission of data at just under 100 Gbps between the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory in Switzerland and physicists in Ottawa. The collider, in case you don’t know, smashes particles together, producing huge amounts of data.
CERN report at #hepix from @ArneWiebalck : "~2’800 Hypervisors (~450 at Wigner), ~64k cores, ~115TB RAM, ~6’000 VMs" http://t.co/ERnwu87rQ6
— Ian Gable (@igable) May 20, 2014
Gable works in the university’s high energy physics group as a member of HEPnet, a data network for physics researchers. His tweets range from links to deeply technical reports on CERN’s IT department (one of its data centres has 780 servers) to U.S. policy on net neutrality to OpenFlow.