William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Send Twitter $1.00: The Campaign Website

Inspired by an exchange of tweets between two Twitter employees - mocking a user who had sent the company a dollar bill as payment - I’ve started a campaign blog, “Send Twitter $1.00,” on Tumblr.

And I got my own letter and dollar in the mail to Twitter yesterday.

Below is the final text of the letter I sent. It is based on the anonymous letter that the two Twitter employees had mocked, but it also reflects my particular disdain for how advertising is polluting social media.

Dear Twitter:

I use Twitter avidly and I do not want it to become just one more media vehicle driven by advertising. Please accept this monetary contribution of $1 US as a token of my willingness to pay Twitter for the service. I would be willing to pay any reasonable fee for the service Twitter provides, so that Twitter and its partners do not feel entitled to pollute my Twitter timeline with “promoted tweets,” “sponsored tweets,” or other advertising. I am doing this because social media is more meaningful, and the user experience is more empowering, when advertisers are not permitted to override user control of the distribution of content. I encourage all people who use Twitter to take the same action. I want more people to become aware of this idea because Twitter is uniquely positioned to destroy advertising, instead of perpetuating it.

Thank you!

If you decide to join in, I hope you post your own letter to the Tumblr site.

Dollar Letter to Twitter

I'm working on a letter to Twitter, modeled on the anonymous letter that two Twitter employees mocked (via the very microblogging service that employs them!).

Here's how it reads so far:

Dear Twitter:

I use Twitter avidly and I do not want it to become just one more media vehicle driven by advertising. Please accept this monetary contribution of $1 US as a token of my willingness to pay Twitter for the service.

I would be willing to pay any reasonable fee for the service Twitter provides, so that Twitter and its partners do not feel entitled to pollute my Twitter timeline with “promoted tweets,” “sponsored tweets,” or other advertising.

I am doing this because social media is more meaningful, and the user experience is more empowering, when advertisers are not permitted to override user control of the distribution of content. I encourage all people who use Twitter to take the same action. I want more people to become aware of this idea because Twitter is uniquely positioned to destroy advertising, instead of perpetuating it.

Thank you!

Also, I am cobbling together a simple Tumblr site that could be a focal point for a letter writing campaign. If you have suggestions or would like to help, let me know.

Photo: Frederik Hermann/Flickr.

Send Twitter $1.00

Thanks to @VBalasubramani for alerting me to this tweet from Sofi Hersher, who identifies herself as Twitter's Vice President of First Impressions.

The tweet attaches a picture of a dollar bill, along with a printed letter from a person who explains that she or he does not wish to be beholden to Twitter for free services. The user wants to pay.

Here's the full text of the letter (apologies if I have made any errors in transcribing the text from the photo):

"I sometimes use Twitter services on the Internet and I do not believe that there is anything FREE in this world. Please accept this monetary contribution of $1 US as a token of my appreciation to Twitter for the service that it provides to me so that Twitter or any of it's partners do not have a lien against anything I do using Twitter services on the Internet. I am doing this because I do not like to owe people anything in the future for what I take for free today. I encourage all people who use Twitter to take the same action. There is nothing FREE in this world and I want more people to become aware of this idea when they use the Internet everyday.

"Thank You!"

"The things people send to Twitter HQ," Ms. Hersher writes, dismissively.

"Don't you just love the crazies," tweets another self-identified Twitter employee, Laurel Stout, in reply.

I think the letter is brilliant.

I'm looking for a physical mailing address for Twitter, San Francisco, right now.

Dear Twitter: I would actually pay money to not see sponsored tweets

Venkat Balasubramani thinks it is uncool to complain about services you don't pay for.

Okay, Twitter, so let me pay already!

I really, really don't want to see advertising.

I dislike it so much, I used valuable dev credits given to me by my eldest son, who wrote a script to take the damn sponsored tweets OUT of my Twitter timeline.

Other paid-for content litters the Twitter web interface.

Advertising in the flow is like a dark disturbance in the Force.

When Twitter puts a fake tweet into my timeline, a message from a source I did not invite, it's reminding me that social distribution can be purchased.

But the belief that money can buy all media is something I willingly suspend when I go to Twitter. I'd pay good money to sustain the illusion!

Did you see in the business section of the Facebook S-1 the primer on the social web, how it is comprised of three elements? (By the way, I critiqued how Facebook handles the three elements, here.)

Social distribution is one of those elements.

"Social distribution" refers to the way content is distributed to a particular user. In Facebook's case, content is prioritized according to weightings Facebook gives to different postings. The weightings are set according to what Facebook assesses your preferences to be, and those preferences can be overridden when an advertiser decides to pay to intervene.

In Twitter's case, social distribution is determined (used to be determined?) by the individual Twitter user. The user's timeline is (was?) a reverse chronological rendering of all of the posts of the other users she follows.

In a way, you can read all the other busy-ness in the newer Twitter interfaces - the "who to follow" sidebar and the "discover" tab, for example - as hedges against the uncontrolled, organic power of a social distribution channel left entirely in the hands of the individual user.

I imagine I am in the minority on this, that others do not mind ads in their tweets any more than they mind overt product placements in James Bond movies.

If you are in the majority, humor me for one paragraph. Suppose this all got turned on its head? Imagine Twitter contacted you to say, "we would like to put this ad on the side of your truck? Over time, we doubt you'll even see it. But the more you travel with it, the more we will pay you."

What would be your price?

Photo of the truck: Tony De Marco, Adbusters "Carbon Neutral Culture" issue.

Twitter's New Negative Capability

"Starting today," an unattributed Twitter blogger posted last Thursday, "we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world." 

Lots of smart people have noticed this official corporate announcement. Two in particular are also watching the reactions. Venkat Balasubramani surfaces two key questions that are not being asked: "what kind of takedown requests will Twitter honor," and "will Twitter implement its policy only where it has people and offices?" Dave Winer reminds us that our affinity with Twitter is part of our larger complicity with the privatizing of the internet; at stake is "the ability to organize ourselves outside of the control of huge corporations and governments."

I'd like to draw attention to the language of the majestic phrase, constructed in the royal first person plural, "we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content . . . "

"Ability" is well chosen. It denotes a policy choice for which the sovereign has conferred permission. It also suggests that a technical capability has been achieved. There is a sense that both the deliberation and the building may have been a long time coming.

To "withhold content" is a nice way of saying "to suppress" or "to censor." Ingeniously, "withhold content" still carries a connotation of neutrality, as in (to parody the regal voice) "we will withhold content until our people have settled their differences among themselves." Perhaps the most brilliant linguistic deployment here is the adverb, "reactively," which frankly acknowledges the euphemism it qualifies but effaces Twitter's agency: Twitter will censure, but its very ability to do so is predicated on the actions of a third party.

Words matter, if not always today, then in the permission they give tomorrow.

Consider this promotional language from a Facebook flyer, explaining its "sponsored stories" advertising product to prospective advertisers:

"The dynamic nature and unique algorithm behind each person’s News Feed means that each person’s experience is different on Facebook. For Page owners, this means that some of your fans do not see your valuable Page posts (status updates, videos, photos) in their News Feed. Sponsored Stories for Page Posts allows Page owners to ensure your fans see the content that your Page publishes."

This is what happens when euphemism becomes so practiced, what is signified loses color and all political charge. The last thing these words want to allow is the possibility that targeted advertising has gone too far in taking advantage of unsuspecting users.

I hope the obvious political aspect of Twitter's new ability will not turn out to have been cover for the privileging of corporate speech.

Image by Phillip Chapman-Bell.

Data on Proximity of @Replying Twitterers

Eric Fischer looked at geotagged @replies on Twitter - 13.5 million of them he says - and found that 33% of them were to Twitterers less than 10 kilometers away.

Here is Fischer's graph of his results, used here under CC license:

He notes that his results are different from those of a study written about by Richard Florida in Atlantic Cities, which found that 40% of "pairs of connected Twitter users" are within 10 kilometers of each other. To get up to 40%, Fischer's data collects users within 16 kilometers of each other.

Fischer says the results make him "think of Tobler's first law of geography: 'Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.'"

Script to Remove "Promoted Tweets" (Ads) from Timeline

Ads, which Twitter euphemistically refers to as "promoted tweets," have been running on the Twitter site in the right side bar and at the top of search results for some time.

But yesterday was the first time I encountered a "promoted tweet" in my timeline. Yesterday was the first time sponsors trespassed onto the Twitter space I get to curate. The first time a visitor was on my virtual property without my permission.

There have been kerfuffles in the past. Remember when Twitter moved to the re-tweet format that preserves the avatars of the originating Tweeter? In that case, one had to get used to unfamiliar icons showing up in the stream, let in, as it were, by followers who let themselves into your kitchen and forgot to close the screendoor behind them. With the new re-tweet format, Twitter was in effect insisting you give junior curation privileges to anyone you follow. The move may have had the effect of upping the criteria for following; but because tweets and worthy twitterers were proliferating, that was okay.

Ads in the tweetstream are altogether different. Those items are not from friends of friends, not by any stretch.

Well, I was visiting my eldest son, Dan Carleton, last night, and asked him if there was a way to get rid of the damn ads. Sure, he said. He got out a laptop and wrote a script as a present for my 50th birthday. Tossed it off in under an hour. Here it is.

When asked by Dan to reproduce the frustration, I couldn't actually find the original offending ad. It had disappeared from my timeline. That made sense to Dan. He said: "It's not really a tweet. It's an ad." Such an item didn't have a legitimate place in your stream in the first place, wouldn't be something you would want to go back to. And besides, as Dan said, "they want to place the ads near the top of your stream."

The photos show Dan's work, testing his code against a promoted tweet in a search result. In the second photo, you can see a blank space where the ad has been removed. In his next step, Dan tightened things up so that the blank space disappears as well, so tweets should stack normally. If you use his script, you probably will see, on search queries, a promoted tweet appear briefly (fraction of a second) and then disappear.

Here's how Dan describes the script on userscripts.org:

"Script Summary: Hides promoted items from Twitter streams. Was only able to test with the stream from a sponsered hash tag, because promoted items in timelines are elusive. Technical: Sets style "display: none" on the parent of divs with classes promoted-tweet and stream-item-content, onload and every two seconds."

I don't fully understand that but many of you do.

G+ Validates Twitter

A byproduct of Google+ that I'm enjoying is that it validates Twitter.

It's cool that Google+ sets out to do so much -- replace Facebook; organize photos; be a newsfeed; somehow be a micro-blogging platform in and to itself; and other and more -- but it's so nuanced that it's demanding.

And so I find myself returning more often to the Twitter stream and with a renewed appreciation for how straightforward and comprehensible it is.

It's easier to consume tweets. And it remains intoxicatingly simple to post them.

This is mostly the mobile me talking. On the web, the G+ promises to integrate with everything else on or through the Chrome browser. Maybe the Twitter is going to be the ubiquitous stream that is platform agnostic. (Maybe some stripped down G+ mobile client will make G+ less exhausting on the phone -- though it's still intoxicating how much you can get around G+ on the android app.)

I still prefer the old Twitter over the new Twitter, but even the new Twitter is much more like Twitter than G+. So I credit G+ for not complaining about the forced transition (old Twitter seems to have been totally phased out now).

In short, Twitter is feeling more like that bare bones, universal public communication utility that, well, we know it really isn't; but relatively speaking, in contrast to the Google, it feels lighter.

They Let Just Anyone Into Newsrooms These Days

Provocative metaphor from journalist Felix Salmon: Twitter is the newsroom where topics are bantered about, filtered, before the proper news is sent to print:

"Twitter is more like a newsroom than a newspaper: it’s where you see news take shape. Rumors appear and die; stories come into focus; people talk about what’s true and what’s false.

"There are flagship Twitter accounts, of course, like @Reuters, which have a lot of equity in being right, and where it’s highly embarrassing to be wrong. But the point about social media is that it’s social — as a general rule, it’s people talking to each other, as opposed to declaiming the Truth in a broadcasty manner. I’m happy to be wrong on my blog — one of my personal slogans is that 'if you’re never wrong, you’re never interesting' — but I’m even happier to be wrong on Twitter, which is a forum where things disappear quickly and the stream is infinitely more valuable than any individual tweet. I consider my tweets in general and my retweets in particular to be a contribution to the stream; I’m not placing my personal or institutional reputation behind their accuracy."

It's interesting to me that Salmon attributes a kind of uber-authenticity (maybe that's not fair; maybe he just means an assurance of reliability, a harder vetting) to tweets from a media brand, when so many Twitter users work so assiduously to cull corporate tweets from their streams. But I like the metaphor and it makes sense to me that professional journalists need rationales for their tweeting that don't rely simply on matters of voice and personal authenticity.

Image of analog newsroom by victoriapeckham. Used under Creative Commons license.

Spam on Twitter

My impression has been that Twitter keeps up well with illicit marketers' will to spam.

They show up as @ mentions, unsolicited uses of your Twitter handle that normally mean someone has quoted or referenced you. Spammers count on your natural curiousity to see how you're referenced in others tweets, to draw your attention to an ad or some phishing link.

But yesterday a startup I otherwise would have regarded as legit descended to this tactic. It was an @ mention from Klout promoting Pepsi. Totally uncool.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter deals with this kind of spam if and as advertising takes more of a hold of the mainstream Twitter experience. Will it be okay if Twitter takes a cut? Will it be something only Twitter and/or preferred partners will be allowed to do?

PS: Notice the message in the short bio for the spamming Klout account: "We use this account to notify people of Perks, if that bugs you please feel free to just follow @Klout instead." Nice try, but not a fair trade practice!