More Twitter Troubles
August 2, 2008 by Colleen Coplick
Filed under Social Media
There’s more trouble in Twitter Land. It seems that they’ve been working on deleting spammers, or at least that’s my impression, and some users are getting caught in the crossfire.
Dave Delaney is still locked out, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Twitter said that his account had violated the TOS, but I know from personal experience, Dave, and the others who were thrown out of the party early, haven’t done anything other than use the service the way they’re supposed to.
Dave is on day two of his mandatory time out even though others have been restored, an finally got a response from a Twitter rep directly, and then saw a post on GetSatisfaction from Jason Goldman, the official Twitter rep:
We’ve found that around seven accounts were accidentally suspended. They were mistakenly identified as spam; we are working to restore these accounts now.
While we have automated tools to identify spam, human review is still required before suspending accounts. Despite those safeguards, false positives can still occur and that’s what happened in this case.
I’m really sorry to those users who were affected by this mistake. We’re going to work a lot harder to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
All of these troubles are seriously making me wonder why I’m such a diehard twitter fan. I haven’t gotten into Identi.ca or Friendfeed or even Plurk, but I’m starting to think that I’ve really got to start moving my world.
Which are you using? Which do you think is better? And, what’s your user name over there?
(image source, screenshot from Dave Delaney)
Everybody and their mother swear by FriendFeed, but I haven’t gotten into it, to be quite frank. I’m on identi.ca (same username, hummingbird604) but I find that I rarely check it. I’m a die-hard Twitter fan, for better or worse (or in health and in sickness, since Twitter seems to be incredibly afflicted by scalability issues! Way to go, chronic disease!)
These deletions are disconcerting and clearly, a huge inconvenience to the people they are happening to. I would flip out if it happened to me. Hopefully, twitter will find a solution ASAP. On the flipside, I do appreciate that they are addressing the spammer issue, because the spammer bacn was driving me INSANE and truth be told, it was starting to repel me from the community:(
Hi Colleen, thanks for sharing the story. It’s important that folks in our space understand what’s happened. I’m working on a post to sum up my thoughts, but wanted to say thanks for sharing this.
You can find me on Twitter for now at the usual space. I’m also on Plurk, Friendfeed and Intenti.ca.
I’m not convinced about Friendfeed yet. I do enjoy Plurk, but it’s a tad confusing for newbies, so I don’t think it will fly like Twitter has. Intenti.ca is a very simple version of Twitter, the big deal here is that they are opensource. So, users can use it anyway they want, this excites many of my coder buddies (and me too).
Cheers,
Dave
I will stay with Twitter until they remove it! lol yes it can be quirky but I am addicted to it and will not leave it, and with their various twitter clients I find it to be the most accessible service out there for micro-blogging.