This post was mentioned on Twitter by promogurl: Definition of twitter spam: http://bit.ly/Omygj
#dystonia…

I observed one user which happens to listed as one of the top tweeters based upon the number of followers appears to use some type of automated tweeting software that tweets doing certain times in intervals mostly to help promote a website.

Be that as it may, I personally thought the links to articles tweeted were pretty good. Now apparently the user is pretty well respected in the twitter community.

The vagueness of the rules are clearly designed to allow some flexibility for some users or again subjective review and conclusions.

Many join or subscribe to twitter because it is free not realizing after they invested so many hours or days or years building an account with integrity, there is the potential of there account being terminated subjectively to vague rules.

Will Twitter prohibit the use of automated tweets? How would that change the Twitter environment? Or will Twitter leave it up to the users under rule#6 to create a large enough numbers of blocks to cause account suspensions?

Personally, I think the mission of twitter was never clearly defined from the beginning. They are modifying things as they go. If the mission is no automated tweets, then that mission should be clear from the start and even now.

With a more definitive mission, it will eliminate common misunderstandings and keep Twitter fun and less limiting without frustrating generally the masses of good genuine users.

This (along with the recent changes to groups etc on LinkedIn) does show that web 2.0 users don’t like having new rules put on their playground!

Yep about time someone put an end to that nonsense. Rick Astley was far too famous the *first* time round. ;)

Yes I’d hope they do this manually too. As you say Kari, these rules are still a little fuzzy. I’m surprised people haven’t commented on #4, which seems to me to be the most ambiguous.

Still Twitter is only fulfilling a fraction of it’s potential at the moment with 1m users.. As we all know, manual spam control does not scale well so perhaps these are the first steps they are making towards more formal, automated rules.

@Dharmesh

I have had a few people tweet concerns about current Twitter projects. As I wrote in the post, hopefully they will look at these cases in context. Perhaps we’ll see the arrival of pro-accounts which let you bypass some of these rules.

In general, platforms do not like finding out that other businesses or individuals are marketing themselves off the back of their resources for free. If you find yourself in that kind of situation it is often short lived. I can see Twitter wanting to capitalise on keyword, push marketing or ORM users at some point in the near future.

Apps may come under that spotlight too. Most are for-profit business models, using Twitter’s API.

P.S. I like http://twitter.grader.com. One suggestion though, how about giving each profile a unique URL. That way people could link to it, or even better, you could give away badges with their grade. That would push the site as well of course.

5. Disguising links (i.e. writing about one thing but linking to another)

Rickrolling can get you banned from twitter! Shock Horror!

I put an alpha version of TwitterGrader (http://twitter.grader.com) out there last week. The tool doesn’t generate any automated @replies, but it does do an auto follow-back so that users can direct-message the service and get a response back by DM. Many Twitter-based apps work this way.

A human can tell at a glance if it’s a spammy account or not. If they show that we can trust them, then marketers will know we can press on with a Twitter strategy without worrying.