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 »

Monitoring your brand or website on Twitter is crucial to the success of any person or business.  One problem everyone has is figuring out who or what is being tweeted about your site.  Nearly all tweets on Twitter contain shortened URL’s which makes it difficult to keep tabs on what is being tweeted that concerns your site.

Everyone Tweets Differently

While there are common tweeting formats that are followed by most Twitter users, such as using “@yourusername” in a tweet referring to you or your site, there are many who simply add or create their own text or response, then post the link to your site.  If these users choose to use their own URL shortener and also fail to put “@yourusername” in the tweet, chances are you will not have any idea something has been tweeted about your site. Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent loss of Michael Jackson, we were able to witness not only the loss of a music icon (whether you loved or hated him is irrelevant), but also the impact and benefit of real time search capabilities.  Real time search is one of the strongest features of Twitter.

Ploked previously covered the aspect of Twitter being a search engine.  Not only is Twitter a search engine, it provides something that even Google or other search engines can not provide…real time results.  This was witnessed first hand when reports/rumors of Michael Jackson’s death began to surface.

Antiquated Search Results

Should you have tried to search Google, Yahoo or even Bing, you had little luck finding out what was going on.  Even if there were news outlets that confirmed his actual death, these old school search engines did not have the story indexed within their search results immediately.  Therefore the casual internet user may have had trouble finding confirmation of his death right after the report of his passing was confirmed at a media outlet. Read the rest of this entry »