It’s no secret that I love Twitter. It’s my social network of choice, featuring none of the clutter of Facebook and all the inventiveness of a literary form. It’s also more freewheeling than a lot of social networks, rewarding collaboration and promiscuous following habits. And I like how public it is. Anyone who’s used Twitter for a while knows that private direct messages will bite you on the ass; it’s better to keep everything above-board and in the public eye.
Which is why I’m especially disappointed to read this on The Verge:
Yesterday at noon Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibi sent the innagural Thunderclap, when he and 1,921 other people Tweeted simultaneously at a pair of U.S. senators. Taibi used an app, Thunderclap, built by a small team in New York. The service lets Twitter users break above the din by organizing for a mass messaging, a wave of tweets that hits at the same time.
Twitter suspended the startup’s OAuth token today, after it sent its second “thunderclap” to Congress. Twitter told the Thunderclap team it was violating the site’s terms of service by “sending multiple @ mentions and automating sending tweets.”
There are quite a few apps that allow you to automate Twitter posts. So unless Thunderclap is in danger of breaking Twitter—in which case Twitter needs to be fixed—I have to assume that Twitter doesn’t want to be used as a political tool. The Verge speculates that Twitter interpreted Thunderclap as spam, but until Twitter confirms or denies this, it’s best to assume the worst with tech companies. It won’t take too many of these mysterious judgments delivered from on high before people start to get suspicious of Twitter, and once that exciting sense of experimentation is gone, Twitter will die.
Try sending 2000 political email messages at once from the Mercury office and watch how fast your ISP blocks you. Is your ISP not wanting to be used as a political tool then?
Can we keep Twitter for the funz and not for sending mass spam that does nothing but annoy and clog up timelines?
I am so disappointed I still have to read you, even in passing.
Gotta love your end justifies the means attitude!
How would you feel if some spamming buttmuch did that to you, let’s say instead for, I dunno, a Mitt Romney fundraiser?
twitter did the right thing.
Twitter — “all the inventiveness of a literary form”
LOLWTFBBQ
@5, I know, right? #4rilz?
Wow, I thought that was going to be about, “Ugh, i’m so bummed, Twitter is over because it’s going to be ruined by all these mass-tweeting jerkwads spamming the heck out of the service” — but nope.
I… agree with Twitter.
Since I agree with every comment posted here thus far, I’ll just troll:
“I THOUGHT THUNDERCLAP WAS WHAT RICHARD GERE WAS RUMORED TO HAVE BACK IN THE 80S.”
From what I know now, Twitter probably made the right decision. It’s not hard to see how Thunderclap could be used as a spamming service, especially by pyramid marketing types. It’d be interesting to hear what, if any, preventative measures Thunderclap has included. What’s great about Twitter is how it allows you to manage your signal to noise ratio yourself, something Facebook does not. Sounds like Thunderclap might undermine that. Simply put, I think Twitter wants to remain social, but wants to allow users to determine who comes to their own party.