Monday, August 04, 2008

Friday August 1st - a banner crackdown day

On Friday August 1st it appears that a group of Twitter advocates inexplicably had their Twitter accounts deleted. My friend, PFAnderson, was one of those stricken by this act.

PFA, you were not alone. On the same day the anti-spam bots at Google took a dislike to this blog and locked it. Gee, what did I do wrong? One of the reasons given was that I had too many pointers to the same web site. I wonder which one? BarCampRDU? HealthCampDc? HealthCampNy? or Twitter? My only concern is that in the last couple of days I had experimented with Ping.fm to post updates to multiple services as I try to make more use of Identi.ca.

At least Google provided a process for appealing the action. The end result was actually beneficial - so thanks Google! As a result of whatever re-instatement they made they actually enabled me to post directly to my blog from ecto, the blog editor I use on my Mac. Before Google's anti-spam bots got hold of me I always had to go to blogger.com to promote my posts from draft status. That was always a painful process - trying to decipher those impossible to read captchas!

So, I am glad to hear that Twitter has restored the status of their evangelists but this seems like another nail in the coffin for Twitter, which is a real shame. Twitter has/had so much promise. The actions on Friday will probably provide another boost to FriendFeed, Plurk and Identi.ca.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous8:56 PM

    as much as I love the fail whale, I love having a productive and accessible twitter account even more- I think I would be really sad if my twitter account got deleted- it was bad enough I lost my followers for a few days! Glad to hear things eventually worked out in your favor with google

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