Nitpik

Sample Nitpik Posts

"Nitpik" the brand name of an abbreviated online social networking and micro-blogging service often used by businesspeople, entertainers, registered heroes, and fans of the latter. Nitpik was designed to work with most common communication devices, including cellphones, pagers, personal organizers, and hero communicators.

Nitpik was originally developed for heroes to keep in touch with other heroes regarding their status and location. Unfortunately the technology was later acquired by several organizations including ARGENT, resulting in criminals being able to get a lead on hero activities through their own reckless habit. In addition, a cadre of self-important entertainers and their PR firms got hold of Nitpik to spread the news of their own projects, effectively ruining the exclusiveness of the service. After that, access to the service was extended to the public.

Today Nitpik is primarily viewed as a "wannabe" service for those that want to be famous or important. This includes self-professed "hero agents" such as Markman Gold, who, it turns out, is also an investor in the company.

Criticisms

In addition to the loss of exclusivity for heroes, Nitpik has been plagued with all sorts of complaints about its service.

Heroes using the service discovered, much to their horror, that the "FindMe" feature would embed map coordinates with every post, initially so that other heroes could trace them in the event of an emergency. This meant that anyone with access to Nitpik would know where that hero was at any given time, including their personal residences. This was initially supposed to be an optional feature, but ended up being imbedded into the service and left in "Always On" mode. Several heroes were inadvertently "caped" because of this feature.

Another criticism of the service is the limited number of character the service allows per post. Capped at 150 characters total, Nitpik has forced people to use abbreviated words or "Chipped English".

Once Nitpik was made available to the public, a new criticism came about... namely the discovery of "Nitpik Bots"; software that would allow someone with a Nitpik account to be remotely controlled by other users, to carry out certain functions in Nitpik such as approve (or "Okay") posts and to re-post them on their own accounts.

Vox Populii Scandal

In 2013, pervasive NitPik user Vox Populii used the service and his army of bots to launch an intensive and malicious campaign against Galatea Future. This included derogatory comments about her appearance, her name, and even her large chest size. It also included derogatory comments linking her to James Harmon IV, whom Galatea knows as an acquaintance.

Vox's nasty crusade, however, went too far. Although Galatea brushed off the cyber-bullying, Harmon's lawyers sued Vox for defamation, and his public claim that Vox "owns NitPik" resulted in him being banned for life.

The service took a huge drop in real users as the bot accounts were eventually removed. The administrators had to pledge new guidelines to deal with cyber-bullying and other forms of harassment.

Related Information

(See also Twitter)

The full effect of Nitpik was seen in Future's Guardian #3.