Welcome back.

Ben Parr over at Mashable profiled a new Twitter tool designed to automate the arduous task of finding links your followers might be interested and tweeting them out.  It’s called YoTwits, and here’s one of the most scripted-sounding introduction videos I’ve seen in a while.

What caught my attention in Mashable’s writeup was the same thing that caught Kim LaCapria’s attention over at the Inquisitr, this quote from Ben Parr (my emphasis added):

The most innovative concept is the Retweet Anyone feature, but it too falls victim to the same problem: you aren’t reading anything you’re retweeting. People trust your judgment when they see links retweeted by you – if they realize you aren’t reading any of them, that trust may be gone.

That trust may be gone?  Let’s append that – that trust will be gone.

Kim elaborates:

There may be a legitimate, non-douchey use for something like this (as I’m sure I’ll hear in the comments) but I can’t get past the utter rudeness of expecting your followers to read something you couldn’t be bothered to even glance at.

Here’s what this system is designed for: the same people I warned about years ago at Mashable – mindless marketers selling eBooks on marketing eBooks (or other types of snake-oil).

We’re seeing all manner of attempts to use Twitter as a tool for broadcast marketing, something that will always fall flat unless there is actual attempts at using it as a bi-directional communications platform.

I’m all for automating what you can.  I have a tool that I’ve designed (and hopefully will have a new release of coming out next week) that takes Google Reader Shared Items and syndicates them to my Twitter feed.  It’s not automation, because I’m manually curating the flow.  I’m taking things I’m reading, finding interesting, and automatically syndicating them to my larger following on Twitter, Friendfeed and elsewhere with the literal touch of a button.

The key to automation, though, isn’t letting the computer do all the work, but getting your equipment to automatically identify where your attention is going, and then translate that attention to pointers that each one of your audience segments can consume and enjoy.

It’s incumbent upon us, as early adopter gatekeepers, to use language more akin to Kim’s than Ben’s.  This is a tool designed for Twitter spammers.  This is a trust-destroying tool, not a trust-building tool. Twitter is a personal medium, not one where value is built by mindless repetition.

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