Who will control the all powerful?

I’d like you to imagine something for me.

Its a Thursday night and you’re up talking to your friends. You’ve had a great night and say goodnight to them, looking forward to chatting again in the morning.

The next morning, your world is thrown into turmoil. You wake up only to find that your contact with the outside world has been blocked. You’re not allowed to talk to any of your friends, and they can’t contact you. You have no idea why this has happened, and no-one will explain it. All you are told is that you might find out what has happened sometime in the next 30 days. You are cutoff from the outside world.

After three days of nothing you finally are told that you have been cutoff because you have made too many friends in too short a time, which is not allowed. You find out that you will be able to talk to your friends again, but only in a weeks time. You have no way to challenge this,  and no-one who can assist. You are helpless.

The above story happened in the last week to someone I know. Jono Haysom, a colleague of mine at Telstra and an avid user of Twitter (@jonoh is his Twitter id) went to bed on Thursday night last week after chatting with his friends on Twitter, and woke up on Friday morning to find that his account was suspended. He had no idea why and when he contacted Twitter they responded with an auto-response email saying  they would get back to him in 30 days. After much agitation, they eventually came back to him on Sunday and said he could re-apply to open up his account in 7 days time.

The reason they gave for suspending his account was that he had followed back too many people that had followed him in too short a time . That’s right, he followed people that were already following him! Apparently mass followings like this are a trait of spammers so he was blocked.  

Besides this being grossly unfair, the bigger issue here is that as services like Twitter become more and more prevalent, and more and more of our communications with friends moves online,  being cutoff from your social network for a lengthy period of time such as a week would be an extremely unsettling, frustrating and stressful situation for anyone, never mind a person who has done nothing wrong.  If you extend that to a business environment, exclusion like this could affect a persons livelihood in a huge way, especially if the period was not say a week but a month or longer.

The fact is, the above could happen to anyone at any time, and nothing can be done about it.  The administrators of services like Twitter have total control over who can and can’t use their service, and can kick someone off the service at anytime. There is no-one overseeing what they are doing, and no way to appeal against any of their decisions.

Ok, Jono was still able to use email and other services to talk to some of his friends with whom he had established relationships outside of Twitter, but one can easily imagine a time where all communication services are controlled by one group or organisation (look at Google Wave for an example of an integrated service which combines multiple communication mechanisms).

Imagine the power a  group like that would wield then.  Perhaps we should start thinking about that future and considering what checks and balances need to be put in place so that there is always a way to address an injustice such as what was inflicted on Jono.

Its scary when you think about it.

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Update: Well its been a week since @jonoh was suspended and he still hasnt heard anything more back from them. He has sent 7 emails,  many with the same response

“If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name. We will do our best to get back to you within 30 days.”

This really is an indictment on Twitter and its error management processes . They had a loyal and high-volume user who I only ever saw promote the service, and they have totally disenfranchised him by cutting him off from the outside world.

Lets hope this doesnt start happening to more and more of us across social networking services as they try to crack down on the growing spam problem affecting their legitimate users.

Social networks are real time..TV stations need to catchup

Social networks, and especially micro-blogging services like Twitter are incredible sources for the real-time release of news and sports results. As a result, as their use grows and expands, television networks are going to face huge challenges to their archaic programming practices.

These television networks are used to being the “only” source of coverage for their customers to keep up with happenings around the world, be they the latest scores or updates on breaking news items. Because of this, most networks, especially in a place like Australia which is far removed in terms of timezone and geography from most locations globally, often show sporting events on delayed telecast, or hold back breaking news items until regular news bulletins or broadcasts.

These days, that is really playing with fire. At any time, it is very easy to use a service like Twitter Search to find someone tweeting sports scores, or commenting on news items. For example, Channel 7 during the Olympics delayed the broadcast of many of the events, including Matthew Mitcham winning gold in the 10m platform diving. As a result, a number of people tweeted the result of the event before Channel 7 showed it (see here for an example). This meant actually watching became a total let-down and definitely encouraged me to switch channels before it was finished.

If the stations aren’t careful this will start happening more and more, and will be just another death blow to the “dinosaur” networks who are under extreme pressure from a variety of sources (including online) already.

Update (1/9/08): About 10 minutes after posting this it was bought to my attention that someone was live Twittering the coup in Thailand (see here). Yet another great example of the real-time news breaking caapbilities of social networks whic television networks (and for that matter newspapers as well) just can’t replicate.

Impressions of Twitter from a newbie

Well its been a week since I started using Twitter , and I must say its been quite an experience.

Below are my impressions of the service so far:

* Its addictive – Before I started using Twitter I had heard about it a lot but thought I would have no use for it. After using it for a week, I’m pretty much addicted using it everyday, throughout the day. Which leads me to my next point….

* Its useful – I’ve already used Twitter to find out some info I needed for work, setup a coffee catch-up and generally learn more about latest thinking in a range of areas. I can also see how it could be used for so many more things which I haven’t even started doing yet. However….

* Its flaky - I cant believe how much Twitter is unavailable,  or at least crippled with half the features not working. Whilst I realise its going through massive growth surely they can do a bit better dealing with their users, who after all are what is making the service successful. In fact, on this point…..

* It has worshippers – There aren’t many products I know which fall over as much as Twitter does and yet still has so many users who just love it, and jump to its defense when its challenged. And, I’m not just talking about any old users, many of the power users of the service seem to simply love it. Just listen to TWIT any week and you’ll hear the glitterati of the web 2.0 world spending half the show discussing the service. Finally…

* It could do with some extra features – There seems to be a few obvious things that could be added to the service to make it even more useful. One prime example is a communities or groups function whereby you could subscribe to a group and message only that group at any time.  I’m sure there are many others that have been discussed in many others places as well.

Well that’s it. Overall a great first week. Lets see if I’m still using it this much in a month!!