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Cougars vs. MILFs

Bill Cammack — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:33:36 +0000

What is a Cougar? How come this dating term only applies to females and not to males who exhibit the same behaviors?

Definition

According to Wikipedia, a Cougar is “a woman, 40 years of age or older, who pursues younger men, typically more than eight years her junior. The term is also commonly applied to women that are thirty or older.”

This is clearly a corny & simpe viewpoint. Urban Dictionary has some more definitions for us:

An older woman who frequents clubs in order to score with a much younger man. The cougar can be anyone from an overly surgically altered wind tunnel victim, to an absolute sad and bloated old horn-meister, to a real hottie or MILF. Cougars are gaining in popularity — particularly the true hotties — as young men find not only a sexual high, but many times a chick with her **** together.
(see also hunt, prowl, corner, pounce). Noun. A 35+ year old female who is on the “hunt” for a much younger, energetic, willing-to-do-anything male. The cougar can frequently be seen in a padded bra, cleavage exposed, propped up against a swanky bar in San Francisco (or other cities) waiting, watching, calculating; gearing up to sink her claws into an innocent young and strapping buck who happens to cross her path. “Man is cougar’s number one prey”
An attractive woman in her 30′s or 40′s who is on the hunt once again. She may be found in the usual hunting grounds: nightclubs, bars, beaches, etc. She will not play the usual B.S. games that women in their early twenties participate in. End state, she will be going for the kill, just like you. Associated with MILFs.
A woman in her sexual prime who prefers to hunt rather than be hunted. A cougar’s victims are usually under 25, as cougars prefer to mate with men who still have hair. Cougars generally feed and then continue hunting, as they enjoy role reversal.
A Cougar is a female, usually between thirty and fifty years-old, who enjoys the sexual company of younger men. Cougars are only usually interested in men under the age of twenty-five. Also, Cougars are non-committal, choosing to move from mate to mate without ever settling down. It is not uncommon for the same Cougar to attack (sleep with) many different men in the same group of friends. Furthermore, Cougars are older and more practiced in the ways of snaring a mate so they will rarely broadcast their intentions to sleep with you until you are already in her Jetta, headed for the condo she just bought. It is this elusive behavior that earns her the name “Cougar.”
Hot and sexy older woman, usually in her 40s or 50s, single or married, who is sick of her same-age counterparts which are usually hairless, have big guts, who only talk about their insurance premiums and have the TV remote control attached to their hands. Cougars are attractive, in their sexual prime, who know what they want and aren’t afraid to go after it. BIG misconception is that they dress cheap, wear hot pink nail polish, animal skin prints and are not-so-attractive old-looking hags with bleached hair (Yeah those women exist, but they are NOT cougars). True cougars are classy, beautiful creatures who have made their successes on their own, have real brains, usually with expensive cars/homes, and are real head turners. Cougars seek younger men, and don’t have to sneak up and attack…they know their younger mates are eager to get an experienced woman who won’t ask if they’ll call them the next day. Being a cougar is a positive thing.

Did you notice how this is like a crime scene where everyone has a different description of the perp? :D

She was 35.. No.. She was 50…
She was rich.. No.. She was broke…
She looked busted.. No.. She looked HAWT!!! :D

For the purpose of this discussion, I’m going to define a Cougar as a female that’s older than the male she’s kickin’ it to who has uncommon advantages over that male that she’s not “supposed” to have.

We need to keep the “older than” component, or the concept isn’t any fun. If you get served by a chick your age or younger, she was just smarter than you and your life sucks.

I’m willing to toss the “how much money she has” component and the “whether she looks good or not” component as those aren’t going to be primary issues during the locker-room talk debriefing the next day with his boys. As soon as he mentions that he hooked up with an older chick, the conversation could potentially stall there indefinitely as he attempts to explain why and save face in front of his friends who are dying to call him “desperate”.

The age component needs to be dropped lower because those mid-western grade-school teachers that keep getting busted for being in love with their 14-year-old (happy as HELL to get laid!!! :D) students already qualify as Cougars in their late 20′s.

So we need for the Cougar to be older, except we also need for her to have uncommon advantages in the relationship. Otherwise, she qualifies as a MILF, which is a similar, yet completely different fetish category.

MILFs

The acronym MILF stands for Mother I’d Like to ****. It’s a technically incorrect term because nobody cares whether the older chick has kids or not. The concept is more that she’s old enough to have kids or maybe that the way she looks, you would say “She’s old enough to be my mother” even though she might only be 5 years older than you are.

MILFs don’t have any advantages in relationships.

They’re just like regular females except they were born before you were. You don’t need to apply any special tactics for them. Actually, you can do even less as you imagine them to be relatively desperate and hungry for some male action.

MILFs are a fetish category because they’re not supposed to still be in The Game. They’re supposed to have had all the sex they’re going to have in their lives and now, their function is being somebody’s mother or a secretary or something.

The problem with this theory is that women supposedly peak sexually in their 30′s, so even though their looks might be way past their prime, they’re way more DTF (Down To ****) than younger girls who are still playing stupid games and frontin’ like they don’t want to hook up with you when you know that they’re dying to give you some.

So, a MILF is an older woman that you’re not supposed to be able to have sex with, but somehow you do.. Like, you go to some chick’s house to take her out to the club and she got stuck at the library studying so her mother invites you wait for her inside and you happen to hook up with the moms, probably including all sorts of stuff that her daughter wouldn’t have done for you anyway.

Or.. Maybe you decide to do your laundry late at night and this older gal is the only one in the laundromat and one thing leads to another…

These qualify as MILF encounters… Regular stuff, except it just so happens that the gal’s older than you are.

Cougars

A cougar, OTOH, is making moves from her own personal power. You have to imagine a Stella trying to get her Groove Back.

The Cougar knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. There’s an empty space she’s trying to fill… She’s looking to add an element to her already HAPPENIN’ lifestyle.

Unfortunately.. Unless you know how to tell the difference, a Cougar looks just like a MILF and you might could get caught slippin’. :D

It might be a part of her game plan to play that submissive “Oh.. I do declare!.. I think this whippersnapper’s trying to have sex with me! :O” role because she doesn’t want to scare you off by saying “Let’s get out of here” or asking you to accompany her to the bathroom of the bar and then locking both of y’all inside.

The trick to the Cougar is that “She don’t need you.. She’ll let the welfare feed you.”.. The tricks that usually work on women will actually leave you in a worse position than if you hadn’t tried to use them.

Declarations of love and promises of long-term relationships don’t have the pantie-dropping effect they’re supposed to. She’s not looking for Mr. Right.. She’s looking for Mr. Right Now. >:D

It’s also easy to miss it entirely when a Cougar propositions you because the way some of them press up is so subtle and slick. For instance, they might use the typical guy’s trick of feigning interest in your business so you have to.. what?.. Give her your business card.

After that, you need to talka about the business, right?.. Which is usually best discussed over what?.. Dinner. O_o

Of course, you need to meet at the restaurant’s bar before dinner, which leads to what?.. Drinks…

Next thing you know, you’ve gone on a full-fledged DATE with her and you can’t even accuse her of having asked you out! :D

So What?

What difference does any of this make? How come we need a special term for this behavior?

Cougars do what they want to do when they want to do it. If this attitude somehow permeated the female population, it would be a complete disaster for guys trying to get laid.

Sometimes, the only leverage you have is that she wants you to spend money on her or take her dancing or buy her a house.. The only carrot you have to dangle in front of her face is how much better her life will be if she hooks up with you. Take that away, and women would only give it up to guys they actually thought were sexy, and society as we know it goes down the tubes. :D

Once you label the behavior, you can convince people that it’s a deviant lifestyle and eventually even prescribe medication for it. mo money, Mo Money, MO MONEY!!! :D

More importantly, you can utilize the new distinction to brainwash girls that this is not who they want to be when they grow up.. A free-thinking, financially independent woman enjoying her life without being subservient to a man (unless that’s how she gets her kicks..) and getting involved with sex & relationships on her own terms.

It’s kind of like how they try to blackmail guys into selecting a girlfriend by telling us “You don’t want to end up as that old-ass man at the bar, do you?”

Speaking of which…

Male Cougars?

There is no similar term that means male that’s older than the female he’s kickin’ it to who has uncommon advantages over that female that he’s not “supposed” to have.

Guys are SUPPOSED to have lots of advantages over the women they’re dating. That’s the whole point of the mating ritual. She’s trying to make a come-up by latching onto a guy that’s better than her, taller than her, stronger than her, richer than her, with a better career than she has, owns more property than her, has better genes than her family does, etc etc etc.

The phrase women like to use is “I can do poorly all by myself!”

There’s no point in a woman latching onto a man who’s a lesser human being than she is unless she’s one of those people that enjoys telling people what to do. If that’s her idea of a fun relationship, then more power to her.

So there IS no Cougar-type term for guys because we date women as young as we like, so long as they’re legal in that particular state.

Will you ever see Hugh Hefner cold lampin’ with chicks his age? NOPE!.. He likes young chicks and can afford as many of them as he likes. There’s no term for that, except perhaps “The American Dream”. >:D

According to society’s standards, guys are SUPPOSED to be older than the gals they date. They’re supposed to be taller and smarter and richer… It’s not enough of an issue to warrant a particular label, just like women getting laid *WELL* isn’t enough of an issue to warrant the creation of brothels where women can go to Get Their Groove Back right quick and then get on with their business like men all over the world do every single day of life.

According to a recent Time/CNN article, the Cougar craze is a myth… What do YOU think? O_o

Power & Loss

Bill Cammack — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:34:00 +0000

This is a reply to a comment that reader JS left on “Why Women Have To Be Attractive And Men Don’t”. I thought he had some interesting points and complaints and wanted to make this its own post:

Excellent write-up, JS. Thank you for the detailed comment. :)

I’m going to try to list your points so I can respond. Please let me know if I misunderstand what you’re saying:

Men don’t have any power in “the dating game”, because women have the power to reject AND choose.
Women go for men they find facially attractive, so if you have that, you’re golden.. Otherwise, you’re “short”.
Women say raunchy things about men and wanting to give it up to the guys they think are visually attractive.
When women get older, they start to lose their sexiness and therefore lose the only power they had over men in the first place.
Men are at a severe disadvantage, from youth through middle age if they’re not handsome.

ok… As far as men being at a disadvantage, EVERYONE’S at a disadvantage if they’re less physically or visually attractive than the next person. I discussed this over a year ago, in February 2008, in “Life Isn’t Fair”. You’re saying that guys are at a disadvantage when it comes to women in general. I’m saying guys have a disadvantage when it comes to other guys and gals have a disadvantage when it comes to other gals. Life is just BETTER for attractive people. It’ll never be different.

As far as women saying raunchy things about guys whom they’d love to do all sorts of deliciously dirty things to them, that’s true too. I agree with you 100% that IF a woman chooses you, she’s going to act completely differently around you than when she’s around some guy that’s nice enough and polite enough, but she just never thinks about hooking up with this guy.

I also agree with you that women are sexually more selective than men are. There are biological reasons for this as well as societal pressures to not want people to believe that they’re “sluts”. There’s also the reason that women generally tend to get emotionally wrapped up in sex while guys are “getting girls”, and the good times that are had are appreciated, but it’s really emotionally no big deal. I won’t bother getting into the technical issues of “body memory”….

As far as women losing power as they get older, that’s true in most cases, but not true in some cases. If a woman is becoming a better human being through her life experiences, she’s probably way more attractive when she’s older than she was when she was younger. Not everybody likes ditzy girls with big tits….. wait… EVERYBODY likes ditzy girls with big tits, but my point is that intelligence, sensuality, sexuality, world-view and overall understanding of life in general can be very sexy if a woman develops herself mentally and emotionally during her dating career instead of just accepting shopping sprees and free dinners and remaining an idiot.

It’s the women who remain idiots who ultimately lose their power over men because the only reason guys were talking to them at all was because they wanted to have sex with them. Women with CLASS are going to have men that want to spend time with them for many, many, many, many, many years after the ditzy sex-chicks become has-beens and nobody pays any attention to them anymore or ever holds the door open for them to pass through.

So now, we come to where I disagree with your point…

Men don’t have ANY power. They THINK they have power in the dating game, but they don’t. Women hold all the cards. They have the power to reject AND choose.

While it’s true that women are the ones who choose whether to spread their legs or not, that doesn’t equal “power”. I discussed this back in July 2008, in “5 Tips on How To Get A Girlfriend”. The *ONLY* reason a woman would have power over YOU through her choice of whether to have sex with you or not is if you have ONLY. ONE. WOMAN! Does that make sense?

If you have only one woman, that’s YOUR FAULT for not exercising YOUR POWER and getting more than one. If YOU chose to put all your eggs in one basket, that’s YOUR PROBLEM and you can’t blame it on women for all choosing to have sex with Brad Pitt…. GO. GET. OTHER. WOMEN… GO. GET. *MORE*. WOMEN. :D

If you can’t find any more really attractive women, LOWER. YOUR. STANDARDS. Do not complain about how women are all choosey unless YOU’VE kicked it with women that you consider less attractive and even THEY didn’t want to mess with you.

Do you see where this is going?… The power which women obviously have, which is the power to give it up or not give it up, ONLY extends as far as the physical boundaries of their own bodies. It’s YOU that’s giving women power over YOU by saying that if particular women don’t have sex with you, you can’t get laid at all.

Similarly, YOU have ZERO POWER over a woman getting pregnant. If she says she wants to get pregnant, you can just tell her “go ahead” and see what happens. The ONLY way you have power in that situation is if she wants to get pregnant BY YOU, and you haven’t made any donations to the sperm bank. Get it?

So, yes, women have power. Power over themselves, not over YOU. If the hawt chicks you know don’t want to give you some, start hanging out with other chicks. Hang out in another town. Move to another country. Do whatever you have to do to make your quality of life what you want it to be.

Is it TOUGH for non-handsome dudes to get on? Yup. Is it unfortunate? Yup. Unfortunately, that’s life, in the United States, at least. That’s why guys develop tricks and scams to cheat women out of sex. That’s why guys lie and tell chicks ANYTHING to get them to lay down.

Start studying and get your game up. If that doesn’t work, make sure you hang out in places where the guys look worse than you do and you’ll be King of the Hill.

Thanks again for the comment. :)

~Bill

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Terms of Endearment

Bill Cammack — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:29:22 +0000

A certain long, blonde, curly-haired friend of mine who will remain nameless doesn’t like it when I use the word “chick”.

I find this interesting, because “chick” is a generic middle-of-the-road term… like “dude”. Imagine guys running around town CRYING because chicks were calling them “dudes”! :D

The problem here is that you can’t please all of the chicks all of the time. When they’re young, they want to be called women, because that’s how they’d like to perceive themselves… as mature. When they’re older, they want to be called girls… because that’s how they’d like to perceive themselves… as young. Did you ever notice that? If you ask an older chick where she’s going… “Out with the girls!” “Girls’ Night Out!” But if you call a younger chick a girl, she’s all offended. :D

One time, I even had a chick get upset that I used the term “females”. I forgot what her argument was, but it was something like not acknowledging her as being human. :/ It’s like what would you like me to call you? You’re obviously human (or else I wouldn’t be talking to you). You’re apparently a female, unless you have something to tell me. So what would you like me to call you? “Male”? “Human”?

Of course, this problem is amplified when you do like DatingGenius and battle several chicks at a time. It sounds like a joke! :D “A single chick, a chick with a boyfriend and a lesbian walk into a bar…” Matter of fact, it’s probably worse than *that*! :D “A single Christian chick, a Jewish chick with a boyfriend and an Atheist lesbian walk into a bar….”

I don’t have the time, and CERTAINLY don’t have the interest to juggle all of these categories while I try to have a real-time discussion with people. I don’t have time to say women for the women and ladies for the ladies and chicks for the chicks and girls for the girls and females for the females.

Having said that…. :D

Knowing how easy it is to knock chicks emotionally off balance, what you want to do is MINIMIZE the chances of that by finding out which category your chick considers herself to be in and tailoring (read: manipulating) your language accordingly. Memorize her category so it seamlessly rolls off your tongue in conversation. :) If someone else complains about it, stick to your guns. Remember… “If she believes it… YOU believe it!” :D

You can also score points by defending against other terms when your chick is around. If you’re hanging out with the fellaz and one of them exclaims “Oh Man! Did you see that bitch’s ASS? :D”, jump in *quickly* with “Hey man… have some respect for the ladies!”. Chicks love that kind of stuff. :)

Also, learn your international etiquette if you’re going to travel. Just because you heard The Beatles talking about “birds” doesn’t mean that that lingo’s still in style over in Jolly Old! According to my friend Phil, “ladies” will get you by in England.

I find “ladies” to be a good, middle-of-the-road term of endearment here in NYC that’s currently widely accepted. For some reason “gals” works pretty well, too. Just pick something that gets you smiles instead of frowns and rock with that until the fad changes… kind of like how you tell a chick you’re going to make love to her, when in reality, you’re going to Tap That Azzzzzzzz! :D

DatingGenius

Asynchronous Video Threading

Bill Cammack — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:55:03 +0000

I spent the day on Seesmic yesterday and had a 90-post conversation involving several of the members. I’ll say first of all that Seesmic has made TONS of improvements since Andrew Lipson gave me an invite 3 months ago. They’re always making improvements to their site, so this post may very well be outdated relatively soon. :)

If you don’t know what Seesmic is, it’s basically like having a conversation with people on a bunch of stickies. In a way, it’s like Twitter, except it’s video and audio instead of text. You get to record a video which goes into the “public” timeline, and other people can watch it just about as soon as you post it. People who see your video can record their own video and make it a reply to your video if they so choose.

They relatively recently implemented threading as a one-dimensional, reverse chronological timeline. This was way better than no threading AT ALL :D but having held a several-hour-long conversation on it that was about actual intellectual concepts, not “what to name a dog” or “who’s going on a date tonight”, I got to experience the downsides of asynchronous video threading in Seesmic’s current format.

The reason I make a point of it being asynchronous is that it’s not a real-time conversation. It’s more like twitter or an email group than it is like Yahoo Live where several people speak to each other simultaneously, or even chat rooms, where everyone’s there at the same time and can jump in with their opinions if they feel like it.

Liz Burr made some excellent points that I hadn’t paid attention to as I was absorbing so many other things during a full day’s use of the app. Someone had made the point that because you record your own video and decide when to stop it, you get to say what you want in its entirety without being interrupted. Liz mentioned that since it’s asynchronous, you can be turned OFF at ANY point, or not listened to at all, as your screen name and icon are attached to your video in the thread. This means you have more of a chance of not.being.heard.at.all. if someone decides that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to based on your behaviors and what you had to say in previous videos. I “knew” this, but I hadn’t processed it until she mentioned it to me. I was already employing that behavior, for example, after listening to a post from someone that I determined was garbage, I would skip anything with their face on it after that.

At this point, I should mention how Seesmic is set up for people to become aware of people’s posts. It’s important to understand this to understand why one-dimensional threading is NOT optimal for an application like this. There’s a “public” timeline that catches everyone’s videos. This is world-wide, but you can set it to only pick up posts in your language. That’s still A LOT of people, and it’s not even open to the public yet. Your next option is a “friends” timeline. You get to choose to “follow” people, and only their videos will show up in this timeline. This is another way you can elect to bypass people whom you’ve determined have nothing valid or intelligent to say… don’t “follow” them. They’ll still show up if you’re looking at a thread that they’ve contributed videos to, but then you resort to visual parsing and skip them as usual.

These abilities to select people to follow and people to “allow to speak” by clicking on their videos and watching them all the way to the end absolutely alters each person’s perception of a thread they arrive to. Seesmic member Otir read a perfect analogy of the situation, telling the story of a bunch of blind people whom were all offered different sections of an elephant to feel and then to give their opinion of what an elephant is like. Each of them had their own perception of “an elephant”, and that perception colored what they had to say about elephants.

First of all, if you’re following certain people, their posts come up in your “friends” timeline. If you click on the member’s icon, you go straight to their opinion. That’s a good thing. However, you’re jumping in in the middle of the thread. You can click “conversation” and see the entire list of posts in that thread. This is where your personal bias comes into play. If you don’t have any respect for the people earlier in the timeline, you might skip their videos entirely, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If there are a whole lot of videos before the person you’re following, you might not be inclined to watch an hour’s worth of posts before you enjoy what you really came here to see… thus, bypassing much of the context of the situation. If you’ve determined that the person you’re following is more credible than others in the thread, you may be inclined to reply along the lines of that personal bias. This is where we get the blind people approaching the elephant from different sides and angles.

Another “problem” with this layout is that what you’re looking at is NOT actually linear other than chronologically. The posts are laid out by the TIME that they were posted to the site, but they are not differentiated by the TANGENT of the thread that that particular post followed. This leads to a circular, “telephone game” situation, because people show up to a thread hours after it started, read something a “friend” of theirs posted, which was dealt with hours ago, and respond to that person’s post without watching all of the surrounding material.

My thread was 90 posts long. Even if each person took only one minute to say what they had to say (and I’ve seen videos that were 5 minutes long, so if there’s a time limit on individual videos, it’s NOT shorter than that), that means that to absorb the entire thread, you’d have to sit there as long as a feature film. People aren’t going to wait that long to reply. As a matter of fact, people started showing up and making NEW threads asking for someone to summarize my thread because they didn’t want to go back and read it all. This is another way that posts get “lost in the sauce”. People show up and want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the work to go back and experience each post.

Another reason it becomes circular is let’s say you have three tangents in a thread. As the original thread participants scramble “left and right” (since it’s all appearing as a one-dimensional timeline) to deal with tangents, 20 posts down the line, someone reads something from a tangent that was already resolved, hits “reply” and now, your 21st post is actually a response to your 5th post. :/ Then, THEIR “friends” see what THEY posted and continue the previously resolved tangent, causing the original thread participants to scramble over there and put out THAT fire… AGAIN. :/ Meanwhile, the thread splinters more and more and is misinterpreted more and more but LOOKS like a single, chronologically-ordered discussion. The snowball rolls further downhill when someone shows up to post #60, which is really only three posts removed from post #5 and doesn’t want to read the rest of the material, so they assume that all 60 posts have been along the same tangent.

Like I said, this only comes into play if you’re trying to have an intelligent conversation. If you’re just socializing via video, you don’t need to worry about tangents and following thoughts and concepts. You just throw up a “me too” post and you’re good… you feel like you’re a part of the conversation, whether people are “following” you or not.

Jan McLaughlin mentioned an addition that I think would work very well in these situations… the ability for the originator to moderate their thread. I suppose the ability to assign mods would be useful as well. A couple of days ago, I left a 32-post thread of mine for a few hours and when I returned, it was around 60. Thinking that there was much interesting material to sift through, I clicked on it, only to realize that two people had started online dating in my thread. :/ Instead of taking their chances in the “public” timeline, the best way to try to get each other’s attention was to click “reply” so that it would show up in their “replies” folder (an alternative timeline to “public” or “friends”. The unfortunate side-effect of this was that as they kept “reply”ing to each other, their posts were being added to my thread.

It would be lovely to have a way to separate irrelevant posts from your thread. It would be lovely to be able to remove videos posted to your thread by people that just showed up to act dumb. Not *delete* them, just remove them from YOUR thread so that new people arriving after the fact wouldn’t bail on your 70-post thread because there are 30 posts worth of online dating inside it that’s completely indistinguishable from on-point conversation in a one-dimensional reverse chronological timeline.

Seesmic’s making tons of improvements, so I’m sure features are coming down the line that will facilitate intelligent conversation, such as GROUPS. The ability to have a discussion only amongst the people that *you* choose would be a major development. There’s no need to block others from reading it. Just stop them from diluting the content and making the originators waste time running around putting out fires. Like I said, they’ve progressed in leaps and bounds in the three months that I’ve been on the service.

Personally, I’m a fan of synchronous interaction, whether we’re talking live video or text chat. Even IRL, I enjoy holding arguments against 5 people at a time. :D The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you only have to make your point ONCE, and everyone hears it and we can all move forward and explore greater depths of the conversation. The downside is that you have to actually BE THERE at the time it’s happening to be a part of it. If you show up hours later, all you can do is watch the archive, if there is one.

The upside of asynchronous conversation is that you can join in on work breaks, when you get out of class, whenever it’s convenient for you, you can add something to an ongoing discussion. The downside is that depending on how much time has elapsed between the beginning of the conversation and your arrival, you might not be willing to put in the work to absorb the entirety of the conversation anyway.

Bill Cammack â€¢ Cammack Media Group, LLC

Dude… Where’s My Twitter Link?

Bill Cammack — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:29:50 +0000

As I reported back on June 28, 2007, Twitter ‘ruined my life’ [link].

I realize _now_ that there’s something that I left out.

Today, Charles Hope twittered… Yes, “twittered”… There’s no such thing as a “tweet” or else the app would be named “tweeter”…. Anyway… Charles twittered that the “older” link was no longer at the bottom of our Twitter pages. I checked it out, and sure enough, there was no link allowing me to check back past my first page of the most recent posts. I figured that since they’re always doing tests and trying to improve how twitter works, it was a programming error and that it would be quickly replaced. Then, someone mentioned an issue with spam, and that the link was deliberately removed in response to it.

I still wasn’t concerned, because I know that I can type http://twitter.com/home?page=2 directly into my browser to get to the next-most-recent page of posts. No dice. Pages 2, 3, 4 and 5 all returned the exact same Page 1 entries….. MINUS the entries that had fallen off the edge of the flat Earth, because new people had twittered since I had last refreshed. :/

The link removal wouldn’t be a big deal to people following a handful of people, but when you’re following > 230 people, like I am, it’s a major ‘problem’ and jacks a critical amount of functionality that I get out of Twitter. Fortunately, out of the > 240 people following me on these social status-update sites like Twitter and Pownce (and Jaiku? … Haven’t heard from that app in AGES!), Veronica Belmont replied to my status update on Pownce [link], informing me not only that it was a temporary issue, but pointing me to the Twitter blog where Biz Stone had already addressed the issue earlier this morning. Fortunately, she replied on Pownce, because on Twitter, her post would have scrolled off the bottom of my “page 1″ and been (temporarily) lost forever, unless she had added an @BillCammack to it and it would have alighted in my “replies” section. So, thanks to Veronica, this is a different post than it would have been. :)

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

For me, one of the values of Twitter is that you don’t have to pay attention to it and it will save the status updates for you. I’ve gone back as far as 11 pages, which span several hours. That’s normally where you lose the “older” link. This means that when it’s crunch time, and I’m being my most effective and efficient, I can release Twitter from my mind entirely and only get back to it when I have processing cycles for it. Removing the “older” link from the first page means that I have to constantly remember Twitter to check it on the web site or I’d actually have to install a widget which would keep sending me the messages, non-stop, all day, consistently distracting me from what I’m trying to do. Neither option’s optimal.

It’s one of those things that you don’t miss until it’s gone. :) Taking the “older” link from the front page of Twitter turns it into the home page of Facebook. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to increase the number of pages of updates that you can see on Facebook’s home page. They’re not even in chronological order. If they were, you wouldn’t see that an entire stack of your friends just joined a new group… You’d see individual instances with other types of updates in between them. When I get to the bottom of Facebook’s ome page, I invariably wonder what happened BEFORE the edge of the flat Earth that the rest of the updates fell off of. Of course it’s a good ploy to make it so people go to Facebook more often specifically so they DON’T miss the revolving-door updates, but that doesn’t work for me personally, so removal of the “older” link on Twitter is nothing short of a disaster. :)

I just checked my page right now, and there are only 20 twitters on the front (read: ONLY) page. Amongst the > 230 people I’m following, the oldest post is a whopping 22 minutes old. :/ I’ve been writing this post for more than 20 minutes, so there’s an entire ‘generation’ of comments that I’ve entirely missed and will never ever see unless they fix their spam bot issues within the next 8 hours or so.

This isn’t the stock market, so it’s not mission-critical for me to know in real-time what my Twitter friends are doing, thinking or saying. However, I was glad to read in the Twitter blog that the “older” link is going to be reinstated ASAP. Part of my daily productivity is using down-time during rendering, uploading, etc to catch up with what’s been going on in the last couple of hours since I even THOUGHT about Twitter at all. 22 minutes worth of status updates from > 230 people isn’t even a drop in the bucket.

Good thing I checked twitter within 20 minutes of Charles’ post, or I would have been completely in the dark as far as WhereTF my “older” link went! :D

Bill Cammack â€¢ New York City â€¢ Freelance Video Editor â€¢ alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack

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