Good pots

John: Hi there John! My pleasure. It’s true. I’ve even wanted to start another blog, just as a way to promote people who create content I enjoy, but that’s rather unnecessary now that I’m running around on Twitter. It does seem to make Blogopolis go round these days.

Dr. Nicole: Well said, Nicole. Helping people while preserving backlinks indeed.

ZuDfunck: Yes we are. I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

ZuD

You made me realize something about Twitter: What sets it apart from most social media sites is the “culture of giving”.

Like you, I am limited by how generous I can be on my own blog (links, mentions, kudos…), but with Twitter, almost all of my posts are in consideration of folks I love and folks who follow me.

Lately, I’ve been using Facebook and Posterous in ways that promote great content I’ve found, and less about my own blog.

Thanks!

John

Chris: Great rule of thumb: you should never tweet anything you wouldn’t want Googled.

Lori: Hiya, Lori! Thanks. I’m not always so succinct.

Melissa: Twitter is a place to be generous. Arriving at this conclusion has been a fantastic thing for my overall Twitter experience.

CV: I agree with all you’re saying. I’ll be by to check out your post a little later. Thank you for the inclusion.

Ramiro: Just give it time. Eventually we might be renaming the planet to TweetEarth.

Philip: Those are fantastic rules Philip. Hard to disagree with a single one.

~ Jason Cochran :: WebFusion5

I must conclude it is after what I’ve been through.

I got my account suspended. Why you ask? Because I criticized another user, because I had an opinion. What ensued was this person I criticized asking his thousands of followers to accuse my account of spam (falsely accuse). “Just send a message @spam with the name of his account” he told his followers, he added “If you do this for me, I’ll add you to my user following”. So far it’s clear I was dealing with a psycho but that’s ok, he’s free to be one. What mattered to me was getting Twitter to realize it did a mistake, the accusations were false and this was just a way to shut me up, a sort of bullying.
By then I was already quite disappointed with the fact that Twitter suspends accounts automatically. I don’t know what the exact number is but if they receive a certain amount of complaints about an account, they automatically suspend it and only later check if they did the right thing.
The Twitter sentence came: “In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms of service unless it’s parody. The standard for defining parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke.””
Yes a reasonable person would, there’s hundreds or thousands of “parody” accounts, people get it, they’re reasonable but I guess Twitter considers their users dumb.

The only thing I could do in this situation was to create another account. Take in count every rule and it’s subjectivity so they couldn’t accuse me of anything. I did, but I continued sharing my opinions so the psycho (edit: Username removed. No need to bring your battle here, thankyouverymuch. Share your story, yes. Bash another here, no.) repeated is scheme and guess what, a few hours later my account had been suspended. I couldn’t wait to hear what Twitter had to say. They deleted my first two requests for an explanation, what rule did I brake was my insisting question. Finally they replied:
“You created an account. It violated our terms of service. It was suspended. You created another account. It, too, violated our terms of service; it also violated our terms of service by being created.
You will not be reinstated on any account; if you create additional accounts, those will also be suspended.”
Wow! Did they just say that? I had to read it a couple of times to make sure. Democracy out of the window and that’s that. If you can turn your followers against someone with fewer followers, they go straight out of the window like it happened to me, no questions asked.

1) Interesting Tweets. I tweet anything that I find interesting. Articles, tweets, quotes and random thoughts are all fair game for a tweet. I try to put my two cents into each and every one of my tweets, but sometimes the 140 character limit prevents me from doing that.

2) Personal Tweets. I post personal update tweets from time to time as I want to captivate my followers and build a personal connection with them. Otherwise, my followers may think that I employ the use of a robot to select articles to send out. That’s why it is important to only tweet articles that you like and try to comment on them.

3) No Reciprocation. I do NOT reciprocate when someone follows me. If I find you interesting, then I will follow you. Don’t be offended or take it personally if I choose not to follow you back, at least initially. This also helps me cut down on spammers as they usually unfollow me once they get annoyed that I didn’t follow them.

4) I am “noisy.” I send out a lot of tweets on any given day, especially in the morning and in the evening. If you do not enjoy following me anymore, then unfollow me. No problem. I like to think that everything I tweet, regardless of how random or frequent, is of interest or value to somebody.

5) Communicate. I respond, in time, to all people who reply or send a direct message to me. Even if your tweet is negative, I will give you the courtesy of a response. This helps to build a relationship with your followers as they will view you as empathetic and sincere. I have also been trying to thank everyone that follows me as I truly am thankful that someone finds me interesting.

I may not have a huge following, but I do know that the followers that I do have actually care about the things that I tweet about. Loyal followers will support your future endeavors and will offer advice to you when you ask for it. In my opinion, this is what Twitter should be all about.

-Philip Nowak