On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Andrew Badera<[email protected]> wrote: > > You should look up the definition of "ghetto" sometime.
According to Wikipedia, it's "a portion of a city in which members of a minority group live; especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure" - and a minority group is "a sociological group that does not constitute a politically dominant voting majority of the total population". Criminals would qualify. Indeed, convicted felons can't vote, and by definition can never be part of the voting population at all. The odd thing about a place like Twitter is that the voting population - i.e. those who are considered the "mainstream", using the application as it "should" be used; those who "get it" - has no actual power to generate or enforce policy. This is a reasonably new situation, because while we've certainly had such issues in political arena before, there has always been the opportunity for a certain critical mass of the population to SEIZE power through revolution and overthrow. Twitter, like other online communities around a specific service (e.g. Facebook, Google, iTunes), doesn't offer any such opportunity. A very real concern that should enter the heads of those who oppose "improper" use of Twitter is that there is a very real possibility that the Twitter team will need to monetize the application, and the single greatest opportunity to do that comes from those who are making money on Twitter. When you compare a random college student, who tweets his party invitations, to a spammer that makes $1,500 a day sending affiliate URLs to a few million followers across a dozen accounts... which one is more likely to pony up some cash? The incentives make things fuzzy. When you have a group with no power that dislikes the most likely avenue to earn revenue through the service, that group tends to be ignored - there is simply no reason to pay attention to them. They can't do anything more than leave.
