picture credit: wakalani
Twitter recently made a mess for some subscribers, when it attempted to purge spammers and scammers from followlists.
The initative was well-motivated but had unexpected and desirable consequences as some Tweeters suddenly found themselves with massively curtailed, or completely obliterated, followerlists.
My take on the situation is that it illustrates a serious challenge for users of so-called cloud computing, especially ‘free’ services.
Like most Social Networking services, Twitter subscribers use the service and “their” data (follower/ following lists, tweets, profile) is entrusted to the safekeeping of the host (Twitter).
Both parties (subscriber and provider) have strongly vested interests in the integrity of the service, particularly in respect of data integrity and availability.
Despite the millions of subscribing Tweeters, Twitter is still a start-up without a declared revenue model. This appears to give Twitter a carte blanche when it comes to administering/ tweaking their services – and subscriber-generated data. Twitter believes it has absolute ownership, in the absence of a true subscription model. Which is not entirely unreasonable.
However, this mindset is not sustainable in the long-term and will hamper the maturation of Twitter.
Twitter does not yet include facilities for subscribers to export or download their lists so, for those Tweeters who lost follower/ following details, the lessons are clear: ‘your data’ is at risk, unless you take steps to preserve and protect what you value.
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