At approximately 9:30 am on Monday, August 11, 2009, twitter suspended my account. But that’s not why I think twitter will eventually fall by the wayside to a similar, but improved business model. It’s more the why’s and wherefore’s. I have sent twitter a dispute. But it will not be looked at for at least a week. That is what their autobot responder told me. And as technology bound as we tend to get, when it comes to things like this, I want a damn human being to talk to.
Let’s back up for a minute to say that I am not just a good tweep (term for us twitter users), but I am a great tweep. I defend and promote twitter on other social media sites and have personally been responsible for several hundred people obtaining twitter accounts. I tweet responsibly. I retweet and more importantly others retweet my tweets. People want to follow me.
There is obviously a problem here and I was not give the benefit of the doubt, not even a warning. I was unceremoniously ripped apart from my account. Others will click on my account and see that it is suspended. Followers that I have bled to obtain and keep, will leave and I will have to wait quite some time to remove the stigma from my good name. My account is named jsgilbert. Twitter did absolutely nothing. They made no attempt to see who or what I was. That’s in a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, twitter doesn’t reinstate my account, because they can do that.
And this will only get worse. We have seen just how vulnerable twitter is. It apparently is easier to crash twitter than it is to make a decent meatball. Twitter also has spammers opening up accounts at alarming rates and no doubt it is the automated equipment designed to catch them (which doesn’t work on the spammers) that somehow snared me.
And it seems somehow fitting that in the past 2 days, twitter has gone out of commission several times.
I don’t know the people behind twitter. I don’t know their personalities or whether their personalities extend into twitters business model. I don’t know if they care about Ashton Kutcher or if they care about me.
I do know that they work hard to defeat certain 3rd party twitter apps whose functions they don’t care for. I do know that they seem to be rather totalitarian in their policies and approaches. It very much appears that it’s their football and when it’s time to go home for dinner the football goes with them. I do know that 60% of all the people that try twitter give up on it. And it also seems that there is currently a huge number of tweeps who seem to be on twitter solely for the purpose of affiliate opps, MLM or simply to become known as twitter gurus.
The core concepts of twitter are actually great, which is why I think they obtained as large a following as fast as they did. And I have learned a lot via twitter and hope others have learned through me. But by its very nature, twitter just seems to have so many bugs and problems. This is why I suspect some other group, perhaps spearheaded by Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Warren Buffet’s former third lieutenant, will figure out a similar system that can simply outtwitter twitter.
What made me really see the light was just how little today, my second day without twitter, I seem to miss it.
The real big question is that after a week without twitter, even if they do reinstate me, will I really still be interested in tweeting?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I admire you for being able to say something worth saying using twitter (assuming you do, since I am not a tweetle-de-dee). As a writer who has actually read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (twice), and a lover of the run-on sentence, I am much too verbose to pack my thoughts into the thimbleful of words allowed on twitter. In the past few years, as I have become a blogger and have written more and more web content, I am learning to say more with less. It is an excellent exercise to try to whittle my thoughts down to 1,000 words, 600 words, 100 words, 35 words, without running screaming into the garden. I have steered clear of twitter to maintain my sanity. I need more words. Keep writing on Facebook, JS, you’re a hoot.
Twitter has grown beyond control and has, perhaps, begun eating itself to death.
I read article a year ago in Newsweek, called “Twitter Nation” and it mentioned other microblogs like Tumblr and Posterous. Familiar with them? Why has Twitter taken off and they have not? What was it about Twitter that made it rise so fast? Enough to give the word “tweet” new meaning? Well, as the old adage goes, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
From the BBC:
“A study by Harvard University of 300,000 Twitter users found that 10 percent of these users created over 90 percent of the content from that group. It also showed that many only used the service to follow others and did not post content of their own. They found that number of tweets in a user’s lifetime had a median value of one.”
Besides losing heaps of money (okay, so is Digg, Facebook, and YouTube), Twit seems to be another dilution of an already thin spread of microblogging avenues. According to a gathering of sources reported on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites#cite_note-147), Tweeter’s Palace isn’t even in the World’s Top 20 social-net sites– outranked by LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and a list of others you’ve probably never even heard of in our little Western Circle of Self-Importance. But let’s see hi5 tell me about what you had to eat today
GREAT post, JS!!
I just never really got the value of Twitter…it seems that if you have something significant to say, you can do it in your daily blog, or post it on Facebook. The nature of Twitter and the frequency of most tweets almost assures them of being disposable bits of information. A diversion, perhaps, but something that I feel most people will eventually tire of.