
Twitter: Please Charge me for Biz Tweets instead of Suspending my Account - epi0Bauqu
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/03/twitter-charge-me-for-biz-tweets-instead-of-suspending-my-account.html
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jonnytran
Twitter seems to be another case of giving away free services online when
people value it enough to pay for it.

It would make things easier for all startups if users didn't expect things for
free. In the real world, when someone at a store gives you something for free,
you look at them, say "Are you serious?!", and walk away dumbfounded. But
online, it's become the default.

Maybe startups can change the expectation by charging by default instead of
the other way around.

~~~
apgwoz
The post on SvN yesterday regarding this sort of idea got me thinking. Why
don't people use the model some museums use? "What do you want to pay today to
see our exhibit?"

You default to the amount you'd ideally like to get, but have a few radio
buttons that have other amounts (one is the free amount).

If your service is based around a subscription model, then you add the option
of, "only charge me once, I can always pay later."

I wonder how well it'd actually work. My guess is that the same people that
buy eBooks instead of downloading them for free will at least throw you a
couple bucks.

~~~
jonnytran
This got me thinking... Why isn't there a "credit card payment system" gem in
RoR? Because if we want this sort of thing to be ubiquitous in startups, our
tools must support them out of the box.

Put another way, startups are too busy prototyping and running up hill to
bother re-implementing a credit-card payment system -- a simple, yet
difficult-to-get-right chunk of software. Unless it's already done, no startup
wants to waste their time doing it.

Again, I ask the question, why isn't it dead-simple to include credit-card
payment into my website? (Please, someone make this!)

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thenduks
Twitter: Please carry on suspending accounts like this.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Did you actually read the post? I said clearly it violated their TOS. So yeah,
they did the right thing. That's why I wrote an apology and asked to be
reinstated. The point was there is something valuable in there, i.e. worth
charging for, that they should accommodate.

And where is the spam line anyway. Is sending one unsolicited tweet, spam?
What about 5? What about one a day? Certainly all follows are not two way, so
in some sense, a large portion of tweet replies are unsolicited. Is any tweet
reply where the person is not following you, spam?

My suggestion was that they keep so-called paid tweets completely separate. So
if you never want to see them, you don't have to. But if you want to see them,
they are one-click away.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I think the repetition is a bigger deal than the unsolicited nature..

unrelated: congrats on the birth of your son!

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yeah, I think you are right, which is the part of the TOS a quoted in the
post, i.e. "updates consist of duplicate or repeating links and/or text."

And thanks!

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brandnewlow
I don't understand how this was wrong.

If there were 100 people tweeting about my startup, and I manually went and
tweeted a "thanks for checking us out!" to each of them...I'd have my account
suspended?

From the title I assumed he was using a robot to send auto replies to anyone
who tweeted about new search engines, but he was doing this by hand? How is
this bad?

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yup, I was doing this literally by hand.

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jasonkester
Indeed. This is pretty much the only thing I use Twitter for at the moment,
and it would be cool if it were officially sanctioned.

About once a week, I'll do a twitter search for "BigCompetitor", which yields
50 tweets a day along the line of "BigCompetitor sucks. I just can't stand
them anymore. Anybody know of something better?"

It doesn't seem like answering that question with a personal message should be
against the Twitter's TOS, so long as you take the time to write a reply that
actually addresses the tweet in question and is not simply a paste of your ad
copy.

"Yeah, it's painful. That's why we built OurThing. Check it out when you get a
chance."

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maxniederhofer
There is value in e.g. a commercial reply to a set of problems or a question
one tweets. If it doesn't clutter up the interface by e.g. being in a separate
area, like on Google, I feel that could be potentially be pretty powerful.
It's not spam because spam is both unsolicited and (mostly) untargeted. In
this case, while I don't solicit the commercial tweet, I am clearly interested
enough in a subject to be talking about it. If it doesn't hamper my user
experience, I wouldn't mind Twitter implementing what Gabriel suggests.

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jderick
How many did you send? If it was less than say, a dozen, that seems
reasonable. Otherwise, I think you are right -- some kind of adwords type
solution is appropriate. They probably aren't quite ready to monetize like
that but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I sent about 25. It was to anyone who was checking out new search engines over
the past few days.

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akirk
I unfollowed you because of the spam. It was really too much.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Yeah, the point was it should be separated so you wouldn't have seen it at
all! But in any case, it won't happen again...

