Twitter Secretly updates the Rules of the game
Posted on 25. Jun, 2009 by Chad in twitter
Twitter appears to have secretly edited their policies without any public announcements, and it appears that they change the terms frequently to suit new needs. That is a the problem with a totally free service, they can boot whoever they like for whatever reason, whenever.
Some of the notable updates:
- Accounts that are inactive for more than 6 months may be removed without further notice
- If there is a clear intent to mislead people into believing this account is affiliated with the company/business in question, the account will be permanently suspended.
- News feed accounts will more clearly designate that they are aggregating news about a company to resolve confusion.
- Name squatting and “user name for sale” accounts will be permanently suspended.
Some of these are new, some are old and some have been reworded:
- If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
- If you have followed and unfollowed people, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
- If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
- If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
- If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #, trending or popular topic
http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/18311 (The original post is dated Jan 14th, but appear to be changed regularly, I’m awaiting comment from twitter on this and will update the post if they respond)
The trending topic changes I agree with, but “Not personal updates.” WTF? I almost exclusively tweet links to posts or articles that I feel are useful or worth reading. Why should twitter dictate that I need to tweet about what I had for lunch!
What are you thoughts?
5 Responses to “Twitter Secretly updates the Rules of the game”
Codrut Turcanu I Affiliate Expert
29. Jun, 2009
yeah, I was looking forward to such an update as most wannabe marketers try to game the service.
it’s bad for reputable marketers who use TWITTER as a customer communication platform or sales-boosting strategy.
all these fake gurus try to trick twitter and send nothing but self-blatant promos
Sensual photography
01. Jul, 2009
Is there somthing like myspace, facebook or twitter that has the mafia wars game on it is 10 year old appropri?
Pozycjonowanie Poznan
06. Jul, 2009
Good thing they’ll finaly be deleting inactive accounts. Maybe we’ll be able to get a serious user count instead of all those huge numbers which are basicaly meaningless because most of them is inactive.
jesse
06. Jul, 2009
I’ve jsut done what a lot of others are doing, if I get a spam blast on Twitter from someone I just block them. Simple enough, gets them out of my feed and also casts one more vote toward getting them off Twitter.
If you follow people you want to follow, none of this will matter thought as you will only be following people you want to follow, its all the mass follow crap that causes all of this trouble in the first place.
Mike
07. Jul, 2009
I agree with Jesse. There’s either a better way for reading tweets or there’s a whole bunch of people that never read other people’s tweets. I’m suspicious of anyone following more than 100 people unless those people are all infrequent tweeters.