Mike Massimino, an astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis, is going to have to do some explaining to the Twitter community when he lands today at Kennedy Space Center. Turns out Massimino wasn’t really tweeting from space on the @Astro_Mike account.
It was actually a NASA employee doing the micro-updating for him, and not even in real-time: Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston. That means it often takes hours for updates to appear on the Twitter account, since e-mails are transmitted from the shuttle only a few times a day.
Not to blow my own horn here, but I figured everyone kinda knew it wasn’t actually Massimino tweeting from space. Isn’t it obvious that astronauts probably have better things to do than browsing the Twitter website every so often to fill in fans on what they’re doing? Granted, you could argue the same about everyone else on Twitter, but it’s still kinda of naive to think that astronauts have always-on Internet connectivity in orbit.
Either way, Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sentinel burst at least 340K people’s bubbles today.
Update: Massimino actually revealed this himself some time ago. Guess that particular micro-message got lost in the real-time stream somewhere.
(Via The Next Web)
ROFL. That’s what all of this ‘real-time’ hype is about.
Real life, perfectly grounded ponzi fraud.
My next child will be live tweeting from inside the womb!
beat that
another fake steve jobs. big deal
That has already been done. See > @kickbee & tweet http://twitter....uses/1066218851
“I kicked Mommy at 08:55PM on Thu, Dec 18!
8:55 PM Dec 18th, 2008 from the womb”
Thanks for the link back Robin. Expect a flood of complaints from people…check out the comments on my post.
Suckers.
Have to go, have to pee.
“..is going to have to do some explaining to the Twitter community when he lands today at Kennedy Space Center..”
As far as I know the chain here was never hidden. You think way to highly of twitter and it’s users to seriously expect this guy to sooth everyone’s nerd rage.
Just being sarcastic
My bad then, hard to tell without the smiley faces
Uh, someone else must’ve broken that story earlier, cause all the while I thought this was public knowledge…
Or maybe I’m just really smart and figured it out myself
I really don’t see why I should care about this. Please re-become relevant, techcrunch!
exactly why i clicked through. who the fuck cares? it’s twitter. you don’t go telling me about what people are putting in their away messages on AIM, do you?
Yeah but you made for fuck sure your Twitter handle was in there right sucka?
That pesky AMERICAN HERO, and his being limited by available technology and obligations to his duties as a member of a WORLD CLASS team of scientists.
He still wrote them, and I still got goosebumps reading some of them. Especially while watching that video of the release of Hubble.
Wrong. Again.
Boy is Techcrunch falling apart.
I had hoped Mike’s month off would yield
the opposite.
Etan Horowitz didn’t reveal anything.
Mike Massimino explained this is how it would work all along.
#FAIL
@ZEE We get it. You are the official poster child for “I Gotcha Twitter!”
We get it. Old news. If you can bash twitter, you do.
Next.
I bash twitter?
evidence, please
He actually tweeted and said exactly that: “I will be able to twitter from space if I have time. I will email tweets to NASA who’ll fwd them. No promises but I will try my best.”
Chumps! The guy did blog posts and podcasts, but everyone turned into drooling puppy dogs because of the “T” word. NASA was just giving the Twitter sluts what they wanted to hear.
This was public knowledge. Heck, he even said it himself!
http://twitter....atus/1676124868
Exactly.
Robin: You’re so naive. He *was* tweeting from space. Not hugely different from tweeting via SMS.
if they faked the moon landing why are you so surprised they faked a twitter message
that’s true!
What are you doing now? I am eating my lunch out of a tube and then will be attaching a suction device to my arse to use the toliet. Sweet.
what a fraud!
Robin, you are on fire today girl! First writing about Streamy FAIL and now stating the uber obvious that the astronauts don’t have a constant broadband connection in space. Wow, how do you do it?
Ahhh…that’s funny! Having made Twitter, TC is now trying to kill it…
Wait, Robin’s a girl? Robin I love you!
Nope.
If he emails his tweets to some assistant who copies them into his tweet account, why wouldn’t that be tweeting by himself? It’s just transmitted a different way.
haha… Techcrunch found clueless on a Friday. Yes cause of security reasons its not allowed to “tweet” from space. It was a known fact, read the “newspapers” for a change
This story is really a disappointment… “…[he] is going to have to do some explaining to the Twitter community when he lands today”.
It’s not enough that the man is choosing to embrace and commit to new technology, rather we have to write blogs about how he owes us an explanation for doing the best he could to stay current with twitter, albeit it through someone else.
I’m for twitter as much as the next guy, but this is just getting out of hand… It’s not life or death people… He owes me no explanation.
It was live-tweeted as best it could be given the space reality…the point was that nasa successfully used twitter to get very positive coverage of an event that otherwise might not have gained as much ‘web’ attention….i congratulate them for using twitter so well….tweet news today for tweetstorians tomorrow
let me ask you this….does it hurt that astro_mike didnt touch his fingers to those golden keystrokes? nah….was a unique..as real-time as possible…exposure of nasa that should be appreciated at that level…but you got some traffic here today from it
For some reason, I think that a guy who just came back from FREAKING SPACE, could care less that his messages were not in real time. I doubt he is going to provide the ‘explanation’ you are looking for.
Just be happy he was even thinking about sharing his experience via Twitter.
In true TechCrunch fashion Robin finds a way to exude sarcasm, superiority and a little bit of nastiness into what should just be a piece of news.
Not to blow my own horn here
Isn’t it obvious
it’s still kinda of naive to think
LOL. Great reporting by Robin. TechCrunch is in a death spiral.
Those who can do, those who can’t blog.
How about those who comment?
are you for reaz? doesnt malkin blog? she DOES stuff…no?
I heard a rumor that @TheMime doesn’t even Tweet from an Invisible Box!!!!
We’ll investigate this right away!
I thought he either had a Verizon phone (but then again, it would have been pretty crowded on the shuttle with his network always standing behind him) or AT&T with more bars in more places…
But then again, it’s pretty hard to type on a phone with these thick space gloves…
When I first heard about this, I kind of expected that it would be done via a remote controlled human on earth.
I’m a loyal, long time TechCrunch Reader and it pains me to say this but – Enough of this Twitter obsession.
Nothing personal, Robin you are an excellent Blogger in my opinion and to be fair it’s not just yourself but unless they’re getting bought by Google or have finally found a way to make some money, then it ain’t news worthy.
“but it’s still kinda of naive to ”
WTF!!!! who checks this crap before it goes out?
is this amatuer hour?
thanks for the kind pointer, fixed.
I like how you say “fixed” and then don’t fix it. I guess it IS amateur hour.
In case you’re still not seeing it, you said “kinda of”. I figured that since we’re calling people naive, I’d point this out.
Also, way to own up to your mistake by passively stating that Mike’s message “got lost” instead of saying that you messed up. If anyone has explaining to do, it’s you.
That said, perhaps next time, NASA can write a simple script to post e-mail content directly to Twitter. That should quell these frivolous articles.
“Also, way to own up to your mistake by passively stating that Mike’s message “got lost” instead of saying that you messed up. If anyone has explaining to do, it’s you.”
but but how else would this twitter story have legs
This doesn’t shock me…stuff like this happens all the time.
This Is a no story, before the guy left i watched in CNN and they clearly indicated that he will not exactly tweets on the space but will do it through someone by sending emails to NASA employee…Ooops Ignorant Robin Wauters..
Hey all,
Thanks for linking to my story.
I actually first reported on the way @Astro_Mike tweets back on May 8 – before he sent the first “tweet from space.”
http://tr.im/kSaq
But even though that post got picked up a few places, a lot of people still didn’t know how he was doing it.
The point of today’s story was to examine the debate over if the tweets were really from space or not and ask NASA officials if they edit them, etc.
I think NASA would satisfy a lot of the critics if Massimino used TwitterMail, because that would cut out the middleman on earth by letting Massimino post directly to Twitter by e-mail himself. There would still be a delay and he’d have to give up his credentials to a third party.
Also, NASA says Astro Mike may plan a tweetup or event with his followers when he lands.
http://tr.im/m6OF
Etan
Fail response, and FAIL for name dropping an app tp benefit your lack of “reporting”
Uh…yeah. He SAID SO HIMSELF he wouldn’t actually be tweeting. This isn’t news.
my spider senses are tingling… this story makes me wonder if someone might be writing the tweets for @sockington the cat
@Robin
“Update: Massimino actually revealed this himself some time ago. Guess that particular micro-message got lost in the real-time stream somewhere.”
Isn’t it your job to read the source material and find that sort of thing out before reporting on it?
Or is this precisely the difference between blogging and journalism that the old-line editors and authors have been decrying: lack of attention to fact-checking before publishing?
I’ve been guilty of this as well, unfortunately, but you can do better. I certainly felt foolish after responding to you on Twitter and then seeing the update.
I missed @Astro_Mike’s tweet too about the method behind the tweeting; I’d thought they’d cobbled together an slow Internet connection between space and Twitter; email to NASA just isn’t the same.
amazing
http://www.gmail.com
It’s like the whole “landing on the moon” hoax NASA built up in ‘69. lol.
The fact that he would send tweets by email to NASA, who would then post them on Twitter, was never hidden. It was in practically every news story about the subject. Not sure what the “revelation” is here, or the justification for any horn-blowing. Just because you didn’t know about something doesn’t mean it was covered up. You really should rewrite this story, because the internets are chock-full of evidence to the contrary of what you’re claiming.
What a waste of space article. This was perfectly clear before @Astro_Mike launched. To make a story out of this is such a wank.
Gah, I hate the comments any more on Techcrunch. TC’s readers need to lay off the haterade.
Anyway, I didn’t know he wasn’t actually tweeting. I didn’t right care much though. I can honestly say I only really read headlines about @Astro_Mike, and all of them billed him as having the first tweets from space, obviously not the case. He sent emails from space.
So, thanks Robin & TC to informing me about the truth.
Jeez!! next we will be hearing that the landing on the moon never happened. Oh wait….
http://www.survivalinsight.com
What a surprise … but who really cares about this?
Shit, it’s twitter, so it’ so cool and hyped to death, anyway.
And this is a surprise why? Everyone knows that at least (I’ll be modest) 80% of famous or popular people on any of these social networks aren’t either the actual person or in most cases are some kind of bot.
you’ll be telling me the tooth fairy ain’t real next!
As far as I remember there’s a delay on any message from space but when someone says they will “tweet” from space it shouldn’t mean that they will email it in and then someone else will tweet it for them. That would be like me saying I’d tweet from the top of Mt. Everest and then having a sherpa schlep my hand written message down the mountain to the nearest Internet connected computer and posting it to my account.
That guy’s a space man.
Pathetic to think that people would actually be concerned about this discrepancy. Get a life and meet someone in person.
Who cares? Twitter is soooooo overated and hyped! Nothing else to talk about, so gotta find something.
This is all George W. Bush’s fault.
No Wi-Fi on the Space Station? No wonder ALF had to get so close to Earth to send an email….and then crashed.
Half the people in the Starbucks across the 101 look like they belong in space.
By the way: Is this another Twitter story in TC?
Twitter gets the same treatment as Obama in the cover of Times…
BTW – Sprint is getting ready to rack millions of dollars when the PRE is launched – The All-you-can-eat data plan from Sprint….well, you cannot use it for tethering anymore….you need to add it with a $15/mo add-on, and it’s only up to 5GB.
I just churned to AT&T after being a Sprint customer for over 10 years….
No thetering???? What is Sprint thinking???
Data is the tool to sell wireless! Have you EVER heard Apple selling the iPhone because the calls sound soooooobetter that Verizon’s???
No – Data Sells Phones
Data Sells New Lines
Data sells, dammit!
And now Sprint is yanking off the phone-as-a-modem feature (tethering)????
Sprint is history!
(BTW – inside info – Sprint is doing this to sell more data cards. If you use your BlackBerry as a modem, Sprint’s system can’t tell the difference between an http request from the BB and one from a laptop)
TC = TwitterChumps
AGREE!
Twitter, twitter-twitter. Twitter? Twitter!
It’s no Twitter! OMG Twitter! Twitter and then Twitter again. do you Twitter?
Oprah wrote a tweet and TC had to cover it, there is no other way, right? That’s some real tech news!
that’s true!