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.

The Google gang has gotten down on its knees to apologize, offering tweak after tweak to its Gmail-centric service. Still, plenty of people aren’t too pleased with their automatic enrollment in a program that invaded their inboxes.

Now, there’s an easy way to bid Buzz adieu once and for all.

Me, I’m in the camp of those who are pretty much ready to tell Buzz to buzz off. In the hours leading up to Buzz’s official debut, I had optimistically hoped the service would end up providing us with a way to manage our existing social media connections — centralizing something old, rather than creating something new. Instead, as I’d feared might happen, Google’s Buzz is really just adding more noise into an already buzzing area of my life.

Now, as any regular readers know, I’m fond of many of Google’s services (I’m even bordering on becoming an Android fanboy, according to a highly scientific quiz I just took). I use Gmail to manage my numerous e-mail addresses and accounts. And that’s precisely why I’m ready to say bye-bye to Buzz: Privacy considerations aside, the last thing I need is yet another social networking site to keep up with when I should be working. And the last place I need it is in a Web site that serves as one of my main productivity tools.

Getting Rid of Google Buzz

If you, too, are ready to swat Buzz away, here’s how: Surf over to Gmail and sign into your account. Scroll down to the bottom of the main inbox screen and look for the link that says “Turn Off Buzz” — it’s at the very bottom of the page, just above the copyright notice.

Thanks to Google’s most recent set of changes, that link now leads you to an expanded menu of Buzz-specific settings (here’s exactly what it looks like). You’ll find options to control whether your Buzz “following lists” are displayed on your Google Profile page, to remove Buzz-related content from your Gmail page, and — if you’re ready to fully pull the plug — to disable Buzz altogether.

The Buzz-busting option deletes anything and everything Buzz-related from your Google account: your public profile, your connections, and any posts you may have shared. You’ll retain the option to re-enable it in the future — a small “Turn On Buzz” link will appear at the bottom of your Gmail inbox screen — but all other signs of Buzz will be banished, one might say, to infinity and beyond.

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