I like Twitter. I really do. It's not only fun, it's also very useful. I have two Twitter accounts: my official work Twitter, @dianthusmed, in which I tweet worthy things about medical writing, clinical research, etc, and my personal one, @adam_j666, in which I do all the ranty sweary stuff.
As an example of how useful it is, I recruited someone to my company entirely through Twitter earlier this year. This probably saved me thousands of pounds in recruitment agency fees. But that's just one example among many. If you're reading this blog, it's quite likely that you're doing so because you saw me Tweet about it.
One of the great things about Twitter has been that you get to decide which bits of the huge amounts of activity you see. You can follow people if you find them interesting, and ignore them if you don't. You can monitor tweets containing certain key words that you find interesting. It's really a wonderfully ingenious way of filtering gargantuan amounts of information so that you only see what you want to see.
However, there is now a disturbing development, which is that Twitter are inserting "promoted tweets" into places where they are not wanted. This is a real threat to that model. Now, in addition to the things I have chosen to see, my Twitter experience is spammed by completely irrelevant and unwanted Tweets that someone has paid to have inserted into my searches. Some Twitter users are also having them inserted directly into their timelines, which seems even more intrusive.
According to Twitter, promoted tweets are supposed to be relevant to particular searches. Well, sorry, but I had a promoted tweet advertising wrapping paper in a search for "medical writing". If they really were relevant, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. Twitter also claim that promoted Tweets can be deleted with a single click. Perhaps they can on the Twitter web interface, but like millions of other Twitter users, I use the TweetDeck interface (which is owned by Twitter), which does not allow promoted Tweets to be removed in any way. They just sit there, staring at me, no matter how many times I try to block them. I have occasionally managed to get rid of one or two after repeatedly blocking and reporting as spam, but then they come back again, zombie-like, the next time I open Tweetdeck.
Sorry, Twitter, this really isn't on. Promoted Tweets are far too intrusive. Now, I realise that Twitter needs to find a way of making money somehow. But surely there are ways of doing so that don't degrade the user experience so badly? I can't help thinking that there must be scope to use the freemium model, ie that Twitter is free to the majority of users, but there is an option of having premium added-value services to users who don't mind paying a fee. This appears to be working well for companies such as LinkedIn or Skype, and I don't see why it shouldn't work for Twitter with a bit of imagination.
But Twitter really need to come at this problem with a bit more imagination. Spamming our Twitter timelines is not going to lead to a successful business model.
Promoted Tweets
I like Twitter. I really do. It's not only fun, it's also very useful. I have two Twitter accounts: my official work Twitter, @dianthusmed, in which I tweet worthy things about medical writing, clinical research, etc, and my personal one, @adam_j666, in which I do all the ranty sweary stuff.
As an example of how useful it is, I recruited someone to my company entirely through Twitter earlier this year. This probably saved me thousands of pounds in recruitment agency fees. But that's just one example among many. If you're reading this blog, it's quite likely that you're doing so because you saw me Tweet about it.
One of the great things about Twitter has been that you get to decide which bits of the huge amounts of activity you see. You can follow people if you find them interesting, and ignore them if you don't. You can monitor tweets containing certain key words that you find interesting. It's really a wonderfully ingenious way of filtering gargantuan amounts of information so that you only see what you want to see.
However, there is now a disturbing development, which is that Twitter are inserting "promoted tweets" into places where they are not wanted. This is a real threat to that model. Now, in addition to the things I have chosen to see, my Twitter experience is spammed by completely irrelevant and unwanted Tweets that someone has paid to have inserted into my searches. Some Twitter users are also having them inserted directly into their timelines, which seems even more intrusive.
According to Twitter, promoted tweets are supposed to be relevant to particular searches. Well, sorry, but I had a promoted tweet advertising wrapping paper in a search for "medical writing". If they really were relevant, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. Twitter also claim that promoted Tweets can be deleted with a single click. Perhaps they can on the Twitter web interface, but like millions of other Twitter users, I use the TweetDeck interface (which is owned by Twitter), which does not allow promoted Tweets to be removed in any way. They just sit there, staring at me, no matter how many times I try to block them. I have occasionally managed to get rid of one or two after repeatedly blocking and reporting as spam, but then they come back again, zombie-like, the next time I open Tweetdeck.
Sorry, Twitter, this really isn't on. Promoted Tweets are far too intrusive. Now, I realise that Twitter needs to find a way of making money somehow. But surely there are ways of doing so that don't degrade the user experience so badly? I can't help thinking that there must be scope to use the freemium model, ie that Twitter is free to the majority of users, but there is an option of having premium added-value services to users who don't mind paying a fee. This appears to be working well for companies such as LinkedIn or Skype, and I don't see why it shouldn't work for Twitter with a bit of imagination.
But Twitter really need to come at this problem with a bit more imagination. Spamming our Twitter timelines is not going to lead to a successful business model.