Very simple. Twitter seems to suspend accounts left, right and centre. Whilst the official version (see below) is claiming to reduce spamming – whytwitter sources show and say different.

May be this reads like a big statement, a little research of how many accounts have been suspended raises an eyebrow or two. The most common reason is ‘Overlapping accounts’. Now – by anybody’s standards, how comes that major news and TV companies can tweet so called ‘news’ on various twitter accounts, clearly coming from the same source? Whilst a small company, plus his or her respective owner get’s suspended for ‘overlapping’ accounts?

It goes without saying, even the whytwitter account has been suspended. Not really a surprise there as it always highlighted the shortfalls of Twitter. Considering that whytwitter is more at the edge of ‘human technology’, readable for everybody, not just technology freaks – it’s clearly alarming to see that the terms and conditions of using Twitter are put into practise. In basic terms: “You don’t fit – you’re out.”

Twitter version: Twitter claims to have dramatically reduced the amount of spam on its micro-blogging site in the past six months.

The company said that spam levels peaked at nearly 11 per cent of tweets in August 2009, but had been cut to under one per cent by February this year.

Twitter said that engineers from its research team had been working hard to reduce spam, but also called on users to help out in the future by clicking the ‘report for spam’ link on any suspicious profile page.

There we go. But don’t forget – “You don’t fit – you’re out.” May be Google Buzz is not such a bad idea after all.

Comments welcome. No point tweeting us as we haven’t bothered to set up a new account.

Have you been suspended? Let us know!

Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

Do you see Facebook consistently beating Google as the most-visited site? Comments welcome.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

But shouldn’t we also look at all the new sites coming up fast – and not forget established ‘older’ ones? eBay for example or Twitter being two of them. Service websites like Pix2Press will undoubtedly grow over the next years to come and revolutionize the way how photo or video media is distributed to newspapers, magazines or TV. If sites like Pix2Press combine their powers with social networking sites, we have Millions of photographers feeding the world-wide media. Back this up with Twitter – there is no place to hide for any celebrity.

Comments welcome.

“Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting,” announced Google Gmail and Buzz product manager Todd Jackson. “It’s built right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there’s always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most.”

“We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don’t have to use different tools to share with different audiences),” he continued “Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you’re sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.”

Are you convinced? I suspect, like me, you’re reaction is along the lines of kinda, sorta, not really.

Making matters a little better are Buzz’s open API and the fact it post updates to Twitter though not call in tweets from those you follow), while there’s support for Flickr along with Google products Picasa, Reader, Blogger and YouTube. Vitally, however, dominant forces Facebook and Wordpress are ignored completely as is – rather strangely – its own social network Orkut (wildly popular in Brazil, ignored virtually everywhere else). Furthermore, it is extremely presumptuous on Google’s part to assume I want to automatically follow people I email regularly from Gmail. After all, these days email is often more reserved for work than play given the dominance of Twitter and Facebook – so hold your horses Google.

Lastly, and this is a biggie: isn’t all this functionality and much, much more meant to be performed by Google Wave?! Wave is founded around real time sharing, collaboration and exchange, so why not simply merge Wave functionality into Gmail. This makes even more sense given that the general reaction to Wave so far has praised the theory, but questioned the logic of having yet another inbox to check and no friends to collaborate with. Merging with Gmail fixes both those flaws.

Ultimately, my first reaction to Buzz is this is Google’s iPad: fairly interesting on the surface, but I’m not sure there’s a market or a demand for it…

Comments welcome…

The Best Practices section contains specific guidelines about Twitter Spam:

Don’t spam people. Twitter’s following model means that you have to respect the interests and desires of other people here or they’ll unfollow you. The most common way to run afoul of that understanding—and to thus look like a spammer—is to send unsolicited @messages or DMs, particularly when you include a promotional link.

Of course, if you run an account that focuses explicitly on sharing exclusive coupon codes or sale information, you’re probably just fine posting promos. But tread carefully, and consider explaining in your bio or background how the account works.

Luckily, even the Twitter technology has moved on; trying to be a ‘Spam Free Zone’.  Masterminds of Internet and Social Marketing – including Orangeleads, I-Net, Digg, Facebook, etc said: “Marketing is ok – spamming is wrong!” “Marketing Gurus”  have agreed that it is not in their interest to send, duplicate, re-tweet or even twitter useless messages which actually only damages reputation and confidence in their potential customer base. That’s new, too.

If new, there are a few a tips: Test the waters by sending just a few promos to start, and then continuing only if people show interest.

To make sure you’re not spamming folks, we also suggest you avoid the following:

• Posting duplicate updates to an account: Posting the same update over and over throughout the day is considered spammy and a possible violation of our terms of service.

• Cross-posting duplicate updates to multiple accounts: If you post the same update to multiple accounts, you could violate our terms of service.

• Following churn: Following and unfollowing the same people repeatedly, as well as following and unfollowing those who don’t follow back, are both violations of our terms of service.

Some people are sceptical about Twitter 101.  Robert Scoble posted this comment on TechCrunch:

I thought that Twitter was so simple that it doesn’t need an instruction manual. Is this why twitter is going to beat Facebook

We rather do what Apple is doing: Focus on featuring the best uses of Twitter (in a directory/store) and stop with trying to make a guide. Is there a guide like this for the iPhone? No.

Twitter has a control problem: They seem to want to reward people for certain behaviours (ala the Suggested User List, which has mostly brands and celebrities on it) while trying to get the rest of us to “behave” and “Twitter properly.” That isn’t the attitude of a mature platform.

“Oh and why aren’t they fixing search instead of doing this lame stuff? Search isn’t indexing old tweets and is full of spam and noise. Fix that stuff and businesses will figure out the model on their own. Look at TwitFilter!”

We are less sceptical.  Some businesses don’t get Twitter right away and we are in favour of any efforts that point businesses in the right direction.

But, as said before – new technology kids are around. TwitFilter is definitely the way forward. Eliminating all sorts of nonsense on our phone, Laptop or Netbook – TwitFilter is bringing it almost to the level of “text message” from people you know. Very impressive and highly recommended. Considering that the same technology has already been integrated into the Google Wave module, we might have a “win-win” situation  – that is – if you are not a spammer.

Comments welcome. @why_tweat

The rapidly growing social network, which lets you communicate in 140-character “tweets” to others who “follow” your every move, has been infiltrated by an influx of unsolicited advertising.

But to some, there’s a big difference between legitimate firms using Twitter as a helpful marketing tool, and the fly-by-night onslaught of messages that promise to enlarge breasts or other body parts.

Twitter’s own half-hearted attempt to control the spam has had little effect. Third-party Twitter clients are racing to come up with better solutions, but as businesses rush to use Twitter, some experts warn that the worst is yet to come.

Having said that, whytwitter™, or @why_tweat is announcing a Spam Filter for Twitter on the 20^th November 2009. Having 30 Mill+ users at hand, it seems a variable proposition.

There are others. Technically, says Paul Granger, Marketing Manger of the Web-based third-party Twitter interface whytwitter™, what we’re now seeing is really Twitter spam 2.0.

“The first iteration of Twitter spam was a tweet that showed up with a picture of a pretty girl on it,” he said. “You looked at it and realized you just got spammed.”

Granger also points out that that was a hugely inefficient way to send spam. It required a lot of manual work for the sender and was fairly easy to block, which is exactly what happened when early Twitter adopters began reporting the problem back to Twitter’s home base in San Francisco.

The second phase of Twitter spam, which we’re seeing today, is a lot harder to identify, and thus a lot harder to protect against.

By using computers to hunt for keywords and replying to “relevant” usernames, spammers are dumping their Tweets into your “timelines” — recent Twitter posts by yourself and everyone you’re following.

The number of such unwanted tweets is rising. What was once maybe one or two messages a day has now risen to around 10 percent of everything that’s showing up.

The problem with Twitter spam, as opposed to, say, MySpace spam, is how personal it can be.

Granger tells a story about a couple of friends at a baseball game who were sitting in separate sections. They used Twitter to figure out where to go for pizza afterward.

“One guy wanted to go to one place. The other was lobbying for a different restaurant when a Tweet showed up suggesting they try a third option,” said Granger. “The sender of this Tweet was the owner of this third option. He promised these guys a 10 percent discount if they came by his restaurant.

“The guys went there instead and had a great time. So is this spam — or effective marketing?”

Granger’s opinion is that spam is any message he doesn’t want to read.

“I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool — specifically as a marketing tool,” Kawasaki blogged back in December.

“If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading,” he wrote. “If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.”

Kawasaki’s message, which he promotes often, is starting to sink in — which could have very wide-ranging effects.

Currently, if you write a Tweet asking for airline suggestions, you might be “followed” by JetBlue or Southwest, both of whom make good use of the network.

But as more businesses adopt this practice, forcing their competitors to jump in as well, you may start seeing every airline around clogging up your inbox with 140-character ads for cheap tickets.

Granger, whose whytwitter™ is one of a number of third-party Twitter interfaces, counters spammers and marketers by applying a scoring system completely personalized to a user’s circle of friends.

That makes it much harder for spammers to break into your network.

“Twitter is only as vulnerable as the network you create,” says Granger. “If you’re using the site as it was originally intended — as a way to stay in touch with close friends and family — then this is the perfect filter.”

But if you’re a power user, following hundreds of Twitterers throughout the day, then WhyTwitter isn’t going to work for your needs.

To this end, Loic Le Meur, whose company owns the third-party Twitter client Twhirl and “Twitter of video” Seesmic, is now adding a “report as spam” button to Twhirl.

That’s a major improvement on how Twitter currently handles spam, which entails sending a direct message to “@spam,” an extra step most people wouldn’t bother to take.

Twhirl’s “report as spam” button automates and simplifies that process. If enough people click it to report a sender as a spammer, then the folks at Twitter headquarters can quickly block him.

Twhirl’s button won’t free you from spam completely, which whytwitter™ more general filter almost does.

But it’s much more acceptable to corporate Twitter users, such as Dell and Comcast, who have been using the service to communicate with customers and who wouldn’t want to be blocked by a general filter.

(Le Meur says if you want to see how much attention they’re really paying, try writing “Dell Sucks” in a tweet and seeing how long it takes them to respond).

Le Meur is sympathetic to such business users, since his own Seesmic Desktop gets about one tweet a minute from potential customers.

Granger is too — to an extent. And he emphasizes that in such a new medium, the users will get to decide.

“People need to make up their mind about questions of free speech, personal space and unwanted marketing,” he says.

He points out that until the general public reaches a decision on what qualifies as spam and what doesn’t — and starts to legislate tougher laws for offenders — it doesn’t matter what new networking system shows up.

“Until the stick surpasses the carrot,” says Granger, “we’re going to be fighting this fight.”

Stay tweat @why_tweat

Time to talk about Google Wave – or the Google Tsunami in a different way. By no means get us wrong, there is a point to it. Even a good one. What did scare us, especially our marketing people — How deep does Google dig?

Consequently:

“Why Google Wave is dangerous”

IF you are fortune enough to get a “Google Wave Invite” – you face the following:

• You don’t know what to do with it – Resolved. Click here
• You will be worried instantly – Once ‘activated’ – you look at accounts you haven’t seen in years. Old contacts, superseded relationships, oh dear – where is Panic Button (or ‘where is the delete button?’)
• You consider changing your email account from Google (They know too much)
• You switch your computer and your phone off. – Just in case.

So what is all the Google Tsunami or Google Wave all about?

Google Wave, announced at Google’s I/O Developer conference in San Francisco, is a hybridized email system – (Ha, ha – you google this) that will fundamentally change the way we think about electronic messaging. This is foreboding for at least five reasons. (Below, a Google Wave or Google Tsunami in action.) Joke aside, this is how it loks like and works:

1) Participating in a Wave is a little like an email chain, and a little like instant messaging; you can embed documents, Google Web Elements, photos and other multimedia, all is presented as one stream of conversation. People can jump in or jump out at any time, and they can track back to see how a conversation got started.

The advantage, Google says, is “rich formatting.” But this “formatting” is also a lot like instant message formatting. We all know what that will mean: short, declarative sentences; loss of all punctuation, greetings, and email signatures (with important info like phone numbers??); and conversations that are much longer than they should be.

2) “With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” That’s what Google says. Are we are the only ones who write an email, then revise it for tone and clarity? It’s creepy enough that other people know when we are typing on Gtalk. Now they can see what we are thinking as we try out sentences?

whytwitter google wave gadgets

3) Every college student is familiar with the next liability. Email chains–the closest thing to waves at this point–are all fun and games until someone CC’s the wrong person, like a parent, relative, boss or overly-sensitive co-worker. “Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process,” Google says. That’ll make keeping track of participants a lot harder. Subtract the aforementioned opportunities to self-edit, and you have a social “train-wreck” ready and waiting.

4) Google Wave, like all fun new toys on the Internet these days, has its own API, aspiring to be a platform as well as a tool. It has “robots” that enable live functions like searching, linking and translation, and a wave can be embedded in a site to make things more “collaborative,” according to Google.

Leaving aside spam for a second–which we believe is no trifle – what is it with platforms? How many of these things can we have before we all join hands across Europe, US and Asia? Any company with moderately ambitious developers is already trying to handle smartphone apps, Facebook’s API, Twitter, widgets, and who knows how many other endeavors. Do we really need to throw another silo of communication on the pile? Yes. But it can’t be controlled by a company who can “change and manipulate”.

5) The worst thing about Google Wave: We will all try it anyway! Google’s apps are roundly excellent, with the exception of maybe Picasa, which is shamed by Flickr. Why? We are curious how the Google Wave – we call it Google Tsunami now –  survived amidst a new, post-recession Google that cuts funding for pie-in-the-sky projects; obviously, Google really believes in it’s Wave, and the search engine.

Sometimes even the giant can be wrong.

Follow us here @why_tweat or leave a comment.