MyTwitterButler.com has posted on their site that they received a letter from Twitter claiming several violations of the Twitter terms of service.  The details including a PDF of the letter sent to the site owner can be viewed here.  While the site owner claims they are being sued, that does not yet appear to be the case.  In fact, the PDF outlines the various violations this site has in regards to Twitter and their terms of service.

Site Background

A quick background on MyTwitterButler is that they sell a desktop application to help Twitter users get more followers.  Twitter has been known to be against “aggressive following” and it appears that is what they consider this application to do.  While Twitter never clearly defines what “aggressive following” is, it leaves it up to speculation of the developers and users. Looking at the developer terms of service, it simply says:

Do not create a bot to promote mass following. Twitter enables users to find and connect with people. Mass following does not help users find interesting connections. Applications found to be promoting valueless mass-following or following-ponzi schemes will be promptly blacklisted. So please, spend your time developing something that helps users find people with interesting connections.

As you can see, the definition of “mass following” is not clearly defined. However, alot of Twitter activity is based on third party apps that make the use of Twitter more efficient.  What is the real difference if you manually go through the Twitter search to find new users to add based on your interests/keyword opposed to using an application that automates the process for you?  You can save countless hours with the help of an application that does this.  In fact, MyTwitterButler allows you to search for users based on keywords. Therefore, I would think this application could be classified as “something that helps users find people with interesting connections” in reference to the last sentence quoted above. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a self-confessed social media amateur and a twitter addict. It started when I started hanging around with a techy crowd and now it’s taken over. We live in the instant age. Message and branding has to have instant impact, websites are dated in a week and it’s a full time job just keeping up with the terminology. We now speak a whole new language and have had to learn on the hoof how to communicate a clear message.

In my business I’ve been developing the SM channels for the last 6 months and have managed to integrate this as central to our sales, marketing and delivery plan. (We deliver consultancy and training to recruitment Businesses.). From this I have 10 commandments to pass on when deciding on social media strategy that I hope will help you in choosing your path: Read the rest of this entry »

It was only a matter of time, but Twitter recently released an announcement regarding the correction of follower/following counts.  According to their post,

For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.

However, a consequence of this change is that follower counts will drop for some people. In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.

So if you notice a drop in your number of followers…no need to worry, you did not do anything wrong.  It is just Twitter trying to clean up some accounts that don’t belong or are not appreciated by the Twitter community. Read the rest of this entry »