Short version: I violated twitter TOS, so my account was suspended (as it should have been). However, I think what I was doing was worthwhile. So what I suggest is a new, paid tweets section (akin to direct messages in functionality, but you pay to send them). So if the receivers never wants to see them, they don't have to. But if they do, the paid tweets are one-click away...
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Last night the Duck Duck Go twitter account was suspended. I was sleep deprived from the birth of my son, but yet still awake being a human baby monitor. So I quietly used the computer to pass the time (like I'm doing now!).
Lacking SSH access (hospital wifi blocks port 22 for some reason) I was essentially blocked from doing any real work. So I decided to mess around with twitter's search feature, which everyone seems to be talking about lately.
It really is cool. There were a ton of people talking about very specific things I'm really interested in, new search engines being one of them. So of course, I wanted to communicate with them.
So what did I do? Naturally, I found the relevant tweets, and replied to them. I'm still not sure if you can actually reply to a particular tweet, but I did click the reply link from each tweet's individual page. They were all tweets about checking out new search engines.
My reply said something like "@username here's another new search engine, which is live now: http://duckduckgo.com. What do you think? Yes, it's ours :)". Some people replied very quickly with feedback, so I know my tweets at least were somewhat relevant. I'm guessing others would have replied too, but I can't tell for sure because my account was suspended shortly afterwards.
So I naturally went to the twitter support page on account suspensions. It does look like I violated this term: "updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text." That's exactly what I did. OK, fine. I sent an apology to them so hopefully my account will be reinstated soon.
To the bigger question though: what should I have done? Not sent the tweets of course...but is there some way to have the same effect without getting my account suspended? For example, should I have just changed up the message each time? Probably wouldn't have mattered. Sent to less people? But all those people seemed to express equal interest.
Thinking about it some more, I don't really see any way in the current twitter scheme to send tweets like this without risking suspension. And yet, there is value here (on both sides). I clearly want the right people to check out the search engine. And people who post tweets about checking out new search engines, presumably, on average, want to check out a new one!
So here's what I suggest, which I'm sure has been suggested before but I'm too lazy to find out where. (And one more nudge won't hurt anyone...):
Twitter should charge me to send tweets like these, i.e. unsolicited business related tweets. The charging part both would cut down on spam and make them money. But wait, isn't it still some form of spam? Agreed, and, as such, it both messes up the twitter user experience for those receiving them (their reply screen) and those people following our twitter stream, which is annoying.
To fix this issue, twitter should also make a new type of message (like DMs) for this stuff. Instead of 'd ' make it 'p '. Each time I make a paid tweet, charge me $0.05. And on the receiver end, put them in their own window so they don't clutter up anything else. That way only the receiver sees them, and only when they want to.
Update: additional comments can be found here.
