Let's all abuse Louise Mensch and Menshn

Regular readers of this blog will realise that I have a particular dislike of politicians and that I consider most of them to be part of a corrupt sub-human species and that entry to Parliament should require each potential MP to answer the question "Do you want to be an MP?"  Those who answer yes would be automatically barred from the job.  There are a few MP's who have real-world experience and who are thus not as bad as the others.

This is why I was quite pleased when I heard that Louise Mensch was involved in the launch of Menshn, a new rival to Twitter.  Anybody who casts their eyes to the left will see that I use Twitter for discussing the law, politics and trying to convince everybody to ride a motorbike. 

I don't use Menshn.

There's no particular reason for that, aside from that it only launched the other day and, to be frank, I still feel like I'm involved in Twitter and Facebook far too early in their lives for my liking.

There have been a lot of criticisms of Menshn on Twitter.  Many of these involve issues with the coding of the website, perceived security issues and some questions over the privacy policies etc.  It's worth saying that despite hundreds of people claiming to have found huge security vulnerabilities there have been no successful breaches of Menshns' security, according to Louise Mensch on Twitter (slightly ironically).

One thing that did seem consistent yesterday on Twitter was the unnecessary amount of abuse directed at Louise Mensch.  People seemed to be using it as an opportunity to have a go at her on points that I doubt she has any involvement with, such as the coding.  She is not the only founder of Menshn, but she seems to be on the one getting most of the flack and a lot of it in quite unpleasent ways.  I pointed this out in a tweet and one genius replied enquiring whether Louise Mensch was herself poorly coded, thus proving my point.  I must say that the other well known founder is a boy, while Mrs Mensch is a girl.  From what I saw, the boy didn't seem to be getting anywhere near the amount of abuse as did the girl - comments directed at him appeared to be reasonable criticisms, whereas those to her were often personal.  I'm no feminist, but it did strike me as little more than a gang of school playground bullies boys trying to gang up on a girl in the playground... I suspect it may have felt like the attack of the nerds.

A common complaint about Menshn has been that there is no need for Menshn because we already have Twitter.  Okay then, would all the Apple users please shut up about Apple since we already had IBMs before the Mac and smart phones before the iPhone.  Being first to market does not mean that nobody else has a right to join a market with a product that looks very similar to an existing product.  If it did then Mr Dyson should be handing all his cash back to Hoover.  Competition is a good thing because it drives innovation - it's worth remembering that aeroplane technology took massive strides forward during the two World Wars due to the intense competition caused by the wars.

Is it bad that during a serious recession an MP is willing to invest in a new start up and build something that may (or may not) encourage people to discuss and become involved in politics?  I don't think so.

There is one massive plus point about Menshn that all the criticism highlighted: presumably the people who were acting like arseholes on Twitter yesterday won't be there!