

Please critique "Read My Tweets" -- using CAPTCHAs to increase your followers on twitter. - amichail

Check it out:<p>http://www.readmytweets.com<p>It's like a banner exchange but applied to tweets with CAPTCHAs to ensure that people actually do read the tweets.
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tdavis
Firstly, I don't really see the point here. Currently, it's basically a game
that asks "Which tweet has a missing word?" There's no obvious reason behind
why I would want to play it, though. I will assume by gaining "score" my
tweets will show up on the site for others to "guess" about. However, as I was
playing, I wasn't reading the tweets for comprehension, just to determine
which was more likely to contain the (arbitrary) "missing word" and I
certainly didn't click on any links (well, not that they were clickable). This
basically nullifies any banner exchange benefit.

Secondly, the method you use to Captcha, i.e. missing words, is way too
arbitrary and prone to wrong guesses. Take the following example:
[http://img.skitch.com/20081231-cexmqnxetfktd6ybbdfei8dpgp.pn...](http://img.skitch.com/20081231-cexmqnxetfktd6ybbdfei8dpgp.png)

The first tweet was just ".net" which I presumed was missing a URL at the very
least. The second wasn't even English, if it was a language at all. The other
huge issue with this is the fact that, in general, tweets are going to be
missing words because of the character limitation. I got a couple wrong simply
because both tweets were missing words that would form a complete sentence,
but only one of them was missing the word you wanted me to notice.

Basically, aside from some sort of novelty, I see no use for this service.
Perhaps I'm missing something.

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amichail
Tweets are generally not that hard to understand. Checking whether there is a
missing word would probably force you to get some understanding of the tweet
-- how can you avoid it?

I could add some heuristics about what sorts of words to remove. But note that
you could always click "Skip" if the answer is not clear. Also, I took out the
"No" option since it isn't fair: a tweet may still make sense after removing a
word.

