Comments on: New Twitter Terms of Service – Bye Bye Bots?

By: Pez

Pez — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:48:35 +0000

I agree Hadley, I think it’s going to be one of those things that you’re not ‘supposed’ to do, but everyone does anyway, like doing 80 MPH on the motorway. I think common sense will prevail.

I follow a fair few bots, and I do find it useful (especially as I don’t use a feed reader – although I should!), but it is nice to see the automated tweets broken up with more human stuff from time to time.

Glad you like @localgovweb too!

By: Will Twitter’s new terms call time on council feeds? « Sharon O'Dea

Will Twitter’s new terms call time on council feeds? « Sharon O'Dea — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:59:38 +0000

[...] Stuart Harrison suggests councils mitigate the risk by personalising their tweets, supplementing feed stories with replies and additional information. [...]

By: Hadley Beeman

Hadley Beeman — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:38:17 +0000

Well summarized, Pez– I think you hit on most of what we’ve been discussing today. My (perhaps optimistic) hope is that common sense will continue to guide the Twitter terms of service (and the enforcement thereof!), and that well-valued automated accounts will be allowed to continue.

Personally, I like being able to see the odd RSS feed in with my tweets – it presents articles at a time (and in a format) where I’m ready to use them. I also respect @cyberdoyle’s view against them, and am glad he can easily avoid them (by not following them).

(P.S. I had no idea you were behind @localgovweb. Nicely done!)

By: Pez

Pez — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:33:01 +0000

Ah, the old #freealncl campaign! A dark day for Twitter.

Yeah, it is worrying, but I think we’re safe for now. It is a good opportunity to reinvestigate why you’re using Twitter, and if you can be using it better. Think it’s already started an interesting debate amongst my followers.

By: paul canning

paul canning — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:29:23 +0000

This was actually in the old T+Cs – I looked at it when setting up @PubSecBloggers . But there were also some other bits which seemed just as easy to break. The new one also seems to provide several other bits which could be easily broken. We’ve all seen people caught for some unfathomable reason and then had to be set free!

By: Pez

Pez — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:19:06 +0000

@Cyberdoyle – I know what you mean, it’s a grey area for me – if it’s done well and offers good content, then I’m cool with it, but if it’s done badly then it just gets annoying.

A council near me (I won’t name and shame), as well as press releases, tweets every time a page is added to the website – not very useful and pretty bloomin’ annoying. It all depends on how much you’re putting out there and how often IMO

Generally if it’s done badly it’s because the people who set it up aren’t Twitter users themselves and don’t ‘get it’, like I said in my post, they just ‘fire and forget’. I’ve made it my personal mission to make them get it!!

By: cyberdoyle

cyberdoyle — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:59:14 +0000

Hope twitter can get rid of the bad bots! also think what you said about councils just autofeeding info into twitter is not a particularly good thing for them to do, its the interaction that makes twitter work as much as the information tweeted.

It has to have some ‘brilliant’ info to keep me following it, and unless it has a human interface I tend to unfollow anything that autotweets stuff. I think it is twitterabuse myself.