UPDATED 15:19 EDT / MARCH 03 2010

What We Now Know from the “Twitter Epic Tweet Scandal”

image On today, the day of Twitter’s 140th employee, I’m left wondering just how many of them really understand the nature of social media.

I just caught Matthew Ingram’s post over at GigaOM on the latest in the “Twitter Epic Tweet scandal.”

image

In case you missed it, the story thus is pretty succinctly summarized by Matthew:

Alex Payne, a Twitter engineer, is shutting down his personal blog after a comment he posted on Twitter became the subject of a TechCrunch blog post and caused a minor firestorm among Twitter application developers and others involved with the company. The comment (which has since been deleted from Payne’s stream) referred to “some nifty site features” that had been implemented on the internal version of the Twitter site. The Twitter engineer said that if users had access to the same features, “you might not want to use third-party clients.”

As the TechCrunch post described, this caused a bit of consternation among developers, some of whom were concerned that Twitter would be implementing features that might compete with third-party Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc. As TechCrunch writer MG Siegler noted in a post on his personal blog about the response to his piece, certain Twitter staffers were unimpressed with the article and expressed their displeasure (via Twitter, of course) over what they seemed to think was an overreaction to Payne’s comment.

This is further evidence that Twitter doesn’t really “get it” when it comes to the realities of social media, and I say this with casting as few aspersions as possible on Alex Payne’s scruples.  I’ve never met Alex personally, but I’ve read a few things by him over the years since he first crossed my radar, and many friends of mine speak very highly of him. I’d also like to preface any comments I have with the fact that I consider Twitter a brilliant construct that has made my life as a publisher wonderfully easier than it should be, and I’m not sure what I’d do without it.

All that said, I’ve always been pretty vocal about the fact that Twitter is a happy accident by the same folks that brought you Blogger and Odeo. Yes, Odeo. Remember them? Very few people do.  It was an early entrant in the very small (and some say still nascent) field of podcasting. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it was supposed to do, but most people you ask say it was supposed to be some sort of directory service cataloging podcasts.

Do I honestly believe that Jack, Biz and Ev actually understood what Twitter was when the first started seeing adoption take off? Not at all.  I’m not really sure that they have any real understanding of technology, sociology or business in general, after having seen them flounder consistently since 2006 in all areas.

Consider their lists of failures:

image Major network security breaches, causing in turn major PR blunders.

Their brand being synonymous with failure.

Missing the opportunity to grow revenue fast enough to actually buy Facebook outright in 2007 or 2008.

Their failure to come up with a business model to justify their as of present completely unjustified valuation.

I love Twitter. I really do. Twitter leaving, dying, or otherwise ceasing to be would really mess up my professional life, and the professional lives of a great many others.

At some point, though, as a pundit who writes about this space, you must stop giving this company that you love a pass on everything and call them to the carpet.  This deal with Alex Payne shows a number of chinks in their largely unquestioned authority on all things social media.

The “Epic Tweet” Itself is Indicative of an Anti-Developer Strategy

Twitter, as a company, finds itself in moral quandary of it’s own making. Their refusal to settle on a monetization strategy has left them without any options but to make their lackluster site a destination.  They don’t seem to understand that the user and developer behavior they’ve tried to foster over the last few years is their greatest strength.

They don’t understand that they’ve created a wealth of monetizable inventory with in-tweet ads (even though a cottage industry has sprung up around this concept). Moreover, they don’t seem to understand that they could have potentially billions in revenue if they were to track, index, and re-serve the links being passed around their service.

Instead, they’ve decided that the only “ethical” way to serve ads is on the site itself, and are upset when the majority of folks using them don’t use Twitter that way.

Twitter Doesn’t Understand PR 2.0

image The folks at Twitter obviously bit into Alex Payne’s butt pretty hard after the Tweet made Techcrunch, and when someone was bothered enough to call of MG at home and impugn his abilities as a writer, that says something not only about their failure to read “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” but their understanding of how public relations works in the modern age.

First of all, in the grand scheme of things, Techcrunch isn’t a major player.  Twitter has already crossed over into the mainstream. They get more publicity on a daily basis by local TV anchors mentioning their Twitter account than was achieved on the front page of Techcrunch.  Being concerned about one article that speculated about Twitter’s long term plans based on an errant tweet by one developer at the company shows a tunnel vision that isn’t healthy for a company that wants to be as big as Twitter does.

An argument could be made that Techcrunch is highly influential in a core demographic for Twitter, that is Web 2.0 app developers. If they think that one particular article is what set off the storm, they’re sorely disconnected from reality.  A storm has been brewing for quite some time – years, really – about the cavalier way in which Twitter treats it’s developer community.  This was simply a focal point for that anger.

Rather than trying to pull a ham-fisted Gestapo move of “silence and deny,” they should have taken the opportunity to address this growing concern with honesty and frankness. Something like this:

“Look, we have a business to run.  I’ll wait for you to stop laughing.  Done yet? OK, as I was saying we’re trying to figure out how to make money with this damn Twitter thing. Fred Wilson is only gonna keep buying this ‘we’re working on it, keep sending the Jolt and Pizza’ line we’ve been shoveling him for so much longer.”

“So yes, we’re looking to make more people go to our site, but we realize that Twitter is really all about the developer community.  The world is bigger than us, developers. We don’t have 100% of the world yet.  If we succeed, you succeed.”

They could probably leave out the jab at Fred Wilson, at least until one of the founders finishes business school. You get my point, though.  Be real, be conversational, and above all, be honest.

Twitter Doesn’t Understand Honesty

image They don’t. This was never better demonstrated than a couple weeks ago when SiliconANGLE had their company Twitter account suspended.

I won’t bore you with the details, but they claimed we were spammers, and put us in a “penalty box” for a week, where our account was suspended (after we took our plight public, they unsuspended us a couple days early).

It was coincidental, I found out, that this occurred while I was adding a service designed to filter out bot accounts and find users to correspond with according to keyword.

I mentioned said service in the initial trouble ticket I filed with them, and they immediately latched onto that as the reason why we were suspended.  Only later on in the process did I discover that our account had been suspended before the service was fully activated.  It simply couldn’t have been the culprit.

I don’t fully delude myself to think that there is some sort of conspiracy or grudge on behalf of Twitter against us at SiliconANGLE, but I do know that they’re fully aware we’re not a spam organization. I know that the reasons they stated for suspension weren’t true.

Why couldn’t they be honest with us?  Why couldn’t they be honest with MG? Why can’t they be honest with the thousands of other journalists and users who find themselves in the same situation MG and I do?

There was a time when Ev and Biz would come and comment personally on almost every Twitter post I did at Mashable.

I’d say they’ve lost their way since then, but to be quite frank, I’m not sure they ever had a clear path before them.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU