Twitter, take my money. Can’t say it enough. Stop being jerks. Twitter, take my money.
Twitter really, really, really wants people to stay inside Twitter because it really, really, really wants advertising money.
In related news: TweetBot had to take down the alpha of its Mac app because Twitter was counting beta users against the 100,000-user total they implemented just after the alpha was released.
Dear Twitter: I will give you $50. Just give me access to the API and let me do what I want.
Nick Bilton comes up with the right metaphor to describe the Twitter API debacle — it’s a restaurant that gives away its food — but the problem is that he kinda skips over the obvious solution given the metaphor he used. The problem is that Twitter was giving away all of its “food” for others to sell. Really, Twitter should’ve just started charging money to large customers for access to the API, rather than creating its own food trucks. Hootsuite, for example, charges its pro customers money. They can afford to give some of that money to Twitter. The model already works — Amazon does the exact same thing with its cloud service, selling bandwidth and server space by the level of usage — and it would’ve been relatively transparent for consumers. Want faster server refreshes? Pay for the pro service. Instead, Twitter decided to move inward, breaking a model that could’ve worked. And it’s a shame. We love the fried ravioli.
First Instagram, now Tumblr: blogging service pulls Twitter-based friend finding
Farewell, Twitter? Perhaps someday there will be a better way to embed Tweets on Tumblr…
This can’t be good for Twitter.
To be clear, it’s probably not Tumblr’s fault. It’s most likely Twitter’s. What you’re seeing is a land war on consumer choice that’s taking place in bits and pieces. This is part of a slow deterioration of your rights as a social consumer, and it’s not some nerdy thing that doesn’t mean anything to you. This makes your life harder. It breaks connectivity and makes it harder to use a service that used to work — and it’s all because Twitter wants to encourage you to stay, because their model is built around making money from ads, not their API. At what point does Twitter cause a backlash from normal users instead of merely power users? And at what point does Facebook or Tumblr or LinkedIn or another network start doing the same thing in retaliation? Everyone, take a look at what Matt Buchanan has reported on Buzzfeed regarding this issue. He called it about a month ago, and Twitter keeps proving him right.
EDIT: Tumblr confirmed that it was Twitter who revoked the privilege.
To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability to “Find Twitter Friends” on Tumblr. Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting. Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter’s first partners. While we’re delighted by the response to our integrations with Facebook and Gmail, we are truly disappointed by Twitter’s decision.
Start following this, guys. This may be their business, but it’s your right as a consumer to export your data.
A couple of hours ago, the company’s Michael Sippey writing a blog post about the company’s API which wants to discourage certain types of apps from growing. What types of apps, you ask? Basically, anything described in the upper-right quadrant of this graphic. What types of apps are those? Well …
In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.
That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
As we pointed out recently, the Twitter alternative App.Net came to being out of reaction to some decisions Twitter was making about the company’s ecosystem. By actively discouraging development of these kinds of apps — stuff that front-facing consumers use — and enforcing limits on the size of developer apps (100,000 users or, if you’re already huge, 200 percent of your current userbase) Twitter may force the hand of certain developers to leave the service. Now, to be clear, Twitter can allow some of these apps to further expand, but based on this document, they may just say no. So to put it simply, if truly innovative things like Storify can’t grow in this model anymore, Twitter encourages them to leave. This is an incredibly poorly-considered decision and will cost them in the long term as a platform.
2012 London Olympics in tweets
- 50 million tweets in just over two weeks
- Largest spike: 1.2M tweets in the 1st hour of the Opening Ceremony
- Most buzzed about Olympic sport: football (soccer!) with 2.8M tweets
- Most buzzed about athlete: diver Tom Daley from Great Britain with 630k tweets
- Most buzzed about country: the US with 104 medals and 5.4M tweets
(via TweetReach)
How much did you tweet about the Olympics, anyway?
This practice on Twitter has been existed for quite some time: according to a recent study by Barracuda Labs, the earliest known fake Twitter account dates back to January 15th, 2007 (@krails). Since then, there has been quite the pileup, as the study found at least 11,283 Twitter users that have purchased more than 72k fake followers. That’s big business for “dealers,” who can make “as much as $800/day for 7 weeks of selling followings if they can control 20,000 fake accounts.”
More nuggets:
- The average price of buying 1000 followers is $18
- There are 20 eBay sellers and 58 websites (within top 100 returns of searching “buy twitter followers” in Google) where people can buy (fake) followers
- 53% of Abusers (those users who bought followers) have 4,000-26,000 followers
- The average number of following for a fake account is 1,799
(via Study: Tens of Thousands Have Purchased Fake Twitter Followers)
Buying influence, literally.
With a little over two days to go, Dalton Caldwell’s App.net, which aims to create a developer-friendly alternative to Twitter without advertising or corporate interests, is within $70,000 of its $500,000 goal. If they don’t reach it by Monday evening, the project won’t move forward — but donations (which pay for a full year of service) are starting to flow in at a faster clip, so they may pull it off. The service, inspired by a blog post Caldwell (who founded imeem, among other things) wrote criticizing Twitter’s moves to close its developer ecosystem, is online in early alpha form, in case you’re curious.
UPDATE: On Sunday at 1:30 p.m. EST (with a little help from Stephen Fry, who joined and tweeted about the service), App.Net reached its funding goal — with time to spare.
.@mittromney A true leader would announce his running mate at the Gathering of the Juggalos.
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) August 9, 2012
Someone is illustrating Rob Delaney’s hilarious tweets to Mitt Romney. They’re beautiful. And now, they’re art.
EDIT: The illustrator’s name? Josh Mecouch. He also draws a cartoon called Formal Sweatpants, which looks rad.
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![The Olympics and social media: When restrictive brand standards stifle everyone
Hey dudes! Here’s the latest entry in our weekly post series, “The Pitch.” This post, written by SFB editor Ernie Smith, considers the wider ramifications of Twitter’s incident with Guy Adams — particularly its ties to the Olympics’ heavy branding and strict rules. Find Ernie on Twitter over here.
Last week, journalist Guy Adams learned about The Olympics’ corporate influence the hard way. The reporter and blogger for The Independent, who snarked heavily about NBC ahead of the Olympic opening ceremonies, spent much of last week reacting to the fallout around his Twitter account getting suspended. Why did this happen? And why are relatively open social networks suddenly feeling a lot less open in the wake of the Olympics? It all starts with the branding, and an organization that wants to ensure tight control over every aspect. But does that work in today’s era of share-everything social media? ShortFormBlog’s very own Ernie Smith analyzes the the conflict between brand control and social media overzealousness. Read more after the jump.
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Preface: The importance of branding
The hundreds of millions of pounds necessary to organise and stage the Games is being raised by the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG) from the private sector. In return for investing in the Games, we have promised our sponsors and merchandise licensees exclusive rights to use the London 2012 brand.
The London Olympics branding page • Describing the reasons why the event’s branding is extremely strict. The branding page describes a number of extremely strict standards as to which companies and private officials can use the Olympic marks — to the point where a section of the branding guidelines describes whether or not you can plant a version of the rings in your own private garden. Based on this page, we can’t use a picture of the rings on this article, though we can use the word Olympics to our heart’s content. So let’s do so. Here’s the SEO version of our brand guideline conversation: Olympics, London Olympics, London Olympics 2012, London Olympics Sports, London Olympics Branding Guidelines, IOC, Parlympics, Citius Altius Fortius, and so on. See that, LOCOG? You can’t do a thing to us about that sentence, because we’re writing an article! HAHAH! source
Why the tight standards? Money
$17 billion estimated cost of the London Olympic games source
$860M the amount security, thousands of soldiers provided by the British government, will cost
$1.2B the amount Visa predicts consumer spending will rise during the London Olympics
$20B the amount David Cameron believes the games will generate for the country
» And don’t forget the branding and distribution deals: How do they pay for all this stuff? Beyond the public funding, it comes down to sponsorship and broadcasting deals, of course! A number of major brands, from Acer and Panasonic to Visa and McDonald’s, pay a lot of money to be exclusive sponsors of the event. And broadcasting deals, like NBC’s multi-billion-dollar deal, also count for a massive chunk. These two sources — branding and broadcasting — pay for 92 percent of the International Olympic Committee’s funding. So there is a major financial incentive for the IOC to keep the limitations as strict as possible.
And hence, the crackdown …
beatsIf you’re an athlete and you’re spotted wearing a pair of Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, expect to get a stern talking-to over the matter, as Panasonic is the only brand you can use.
friesWant to eat a bag of chips that have nothing to do with a pair of golden arches? Hope you like fish, as Olympic officials are only allowing non-sanctioned chips to be sold with fish. Seriously.
wifiThe wireless access at the Olympic venues? A steep £5.99 for 90 minutes, thanks to a deal BT has. And don’t bring your own wi-fi, because people with detectors will hunt you down.
Where the social networks come in
Try sharing this video on Facebook or another site. Watch what happens. Weird, eh? That’s because, due to restrictions on the content, this video has been blocked from sharing on many sites due to a lack of contracts with NBC Universal. While contract deals such as this one are somewhat common with big media companies, this case seems somewhat bizarre, as NBC doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the making of this video, which was directed by an Olympic swimmer, and other clips on the U.S. Olympic Swimming Team’s page remain shareable. This suggests one thing — The Olympics are such a big deal that those who make deals to carry coverage are willing to bend the rules to win them over. Which leads us to the tale of unlucky, snarky journalist Guy Adams.
Twitter tips off a TV network
We want to apologize for the part of this story that we did mess up. The team working closely with NBC around our Olympics partnership did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter Rules and encouraged them to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation, as has now been reported publicly. Our Trust and Safety team did not know that part of the story and acted on the report as they would any other.
A message from Twitter • Apologizing for its handling of the suspension of Guy Adams’ Twitter account, which appears to have been brought on by two factors: One, NBC had an agreement with Twitter to help share content, which led to employees working on that team noticing a comment they may have ignored otherwise; and two, Adams tweeting out the e-mail address of an NBC executive, in apparent violation of Twitter’s rules. After Twitter tipped off NBC, the network requested the account be suspended. An outcry ensued, and eventually both NBC and Twitter relented. Adams now has nearly 20,000 Twitter followers as a result of the notoriety he gained from last week’s incident.
The athletes feel stifled on Twitter, too
Meet Olympic hurdler Dawn Harper. Recently, Harper and a handful of other athletes have taken to Twitter with complaints about “Rule 40,” a restriction in the United Kingdom that limits them from being able to mention their own sponsors during the Olympics, or featuring in advertising around a non-sponsor brand. To give you an example of this in action: Apolo Ohno features prominently in advertising for Subway right now, even though speed skating is a Winter Olympics sport and Subway counts Michael Phelps as one of their spokespeople. That’s because, by this rule in the United Kingdom and by agreement elsewhere, athletes can’t show up in non-sponsor ads during the Olympics. Harper has been among the loudest complainants over this issue.
So, where is the line, anyway?
You don’t want to protect that investment so much that you piss off everyone. You’ve got to keep sensible about it and you’ve got to remember that the moment that you as a brand by protecting your own brand start inhibiting consumer choice and consumer behavior … then that’s when you start risking impacting and affecting your brand.
Edelman Digital Director Matthew Gain • Discussing the issue that the IOC and other Olympic-related groups will face as the Olympics go on. While understanding as to why the IOC would want such control, considering the commercial realities, Gain suggests that by going after small companies or people merely trying to get into the Olympic spirit, they may be doing more harm than good. ”I think if it’s a mum and dad business that’s not really benefiting from the Olympics but getting into the Olympic spirit … that’s probably where you’ve gone a little bit too far.” That probably counts for the commenters and broadcasters, too. source
What we should take from all this
Why did Guy Adams’ Twitter account get suspended? Let’s put it this way: Adams probably screwed up by posting that e-mail address, but his account was noticed (and the situation taken more seriously than it would have been otherwise) because an air of normalcy was created by all these brand agreements, even though they’re anything but normal. When there are so many moving parts and so much protection around a brand and a reputation, what seems absurd to the outside world starts looks normal for someone having to work within these rules. If we could rewrite the Olympics script for 2016 or even 2014, here’s what we’d suggest:
one The Olympics are a important event and one with a huge financial windfall for the host country. But the costs of running the Olympics are so high that the event, sadly, reeks of corporate influence, from NBC to the official brand sponsors. What’s the point where the cost outweighs the benefit?
two Both the Olympics and NBC need to consider the implications of the restrictive culture around the Olympics in 2012 — because it’s feasible to imagine damage to the brand’s reputation in the long run if they don’t loosen their brand standards. Four words: Creative Commons-licensed content.
three The reason people got angry about the Guy Adams situation is because it was a sign Twitter is becoming more corporate and less free. We expect total freedom from our social networks, and no single brand, not even the Olympics, is worth violating that trust. Next time, stay out of the fray, Twitter.
Ernie Smith the editor of ShortFormBlog and a social media journalist for TMG Custom Media. He likes “The Room.” Reach him at @ShortFormErnie.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8contM9Hm1qas8z9o1_500.jpg)
Hey dudes! Here’s the latest entry in our weekly post series, “The Pitch.” This post, written by SFB editor Ernie Smith, considers the wider ramifications of Twitter’s incident with Guy Adams — particularly its ties to the Olympics’ heavy branding and strict rules. Find Ernie on Twitter over here.
Last week, journalist Guy Adams learned about The Olympics’ corporate influence the hard way. The reporter and blogger for The Independent, who snarked heavily about NBC ahead of the Olympic opening ceremonies, spent much of last week reacting to the fallout around his Twitter account getting suspended. Why did this happen? And why are relatively open social networks suddenly feeling a lot less open in the wake of the Olympics? It all starts with the branding, and an organization that wants to ensure tight control over every aspect. But does that work in today’s era of share-everything social media? ShortFormBlog’s very own Ernie Smith analyzes the the conflict between brand control and social media overzealousness. Read more after the jump.
David Mark, Nigerian Senate PresidentBy Karen AttiahNigeria, with a population of nearly 160 million, is one of Africa’s giants when it comes to the use of social media. Nearly 4.6 million Nigerians are on Facebook. Twitter is the 6th most popular website in Nigeria. So it comes as no surprise that Nigerians were angered when the President of the Nigerian Senate David Mark suggested that social media in the country should be censored.
“Mark also added that Nigerian reporters should emulate foreign media ‘who never report negative things about their countries.’” Sounds like this guy needs to read more foreign media.
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