On Sat, 18 Dec 2010 07:25:55 -0800, John Kalucki <[email protected]> wrote: > We'd like to help developers maintain a local copy of their authorized > users' followings -- the accounts that their users follow. We hope to > enable > a feature that will make this easier in early 2011. > > We're not particularly interested in helping developers maintain the set of > an account's followers. There are awful scaling issues involved here, > vectors for spammy behavior, and generally not much value for end-users in > providing this data. Twitter is mostly about who you follow and what you > are > interested in. Who is following you is becoming less and less relevant.
Long ago in a Chirp far away, one proposed feature of "commercial accounts" was that if you had a commercial account, someone who was following that account could send you a DM if they were following you, even if you were *not* following them. This assumed some kind of sales / customer service use case, I'm guessing. Now that it seems like "commercial accounts", or at least an advertising sales form and analytics for paid advertisers is in place, is that "I must be prepared for DMs from any of the millions of people who follow my brand" feature still part of the package? Do big paying advertisers like Dell or Best Buy actually want something like that? Would it be a scalability nightmare for Twitter? Speaking of "vectors for spammy behavior", Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web reports that 40% of the Amazon Mechanical Turk task requests are for spamming or spam enablement activities, like opening accounts to services that have a CAPTCHA gate and posting blog comments. (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_40_of_new_mechanical_turkers_work_requests_a.php) Heck, for all I know, those "Hey, look at this!" tweets with multiple Trending Topics are being posted by the same Turk folks that are opening the account in the first place instead of by bots. Perhaps it's time for someone at Twitter and someone at Amazon to have a little chat. ;-) -- http://twitter.com/znmeb http://borasky-research.net "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul Erdős -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
