Warning, atypical post to follow: After quite a while of watching this conversation, and some thought into the "problem", I wonder if the following scenarios are held in the same view:
1) Amy W (from HR Block you all know who I'm talking about) started using Twitter to gain insight into her companies standings both with positive and negative effects. We (the marketing community at least) hailed her as a visionary and placed her on a totem pole. Admittedly, initially, this was done by hand but if you think it hasn't been automated your nuts! Yet, I don't see anyone barking out about HR Block and other companies who are using Twitter in this way. 2) Marketing companies ARE scraping twitter feeds for information on buyers for both positive and negative feedback. In some cases this leads to an automated following and in some cases response workflow kickoff. This feedback along with data expansion techniques (getting your email and other info about you from minimal starting points) are then utilized to send marketing materials via email and/or direct mail. These same companies are again being held on high as visionaries of the field. 3) If 1 and 2 are ok, then why shouldn't people be able to use an applicaiton to identify and follow potential customers/consumers? 4) If Dean pursued building an "auto-blacklister" application that was given away for free and allowed twitter users to subscribe to a feed of "spammers" that would automatically be blacklisted when followed would that neutralize your views of him)? If it would, then why hasn't anyone done this already or are we lazier than the affectors? Applications like Dean's will ALWAYS exist for twitter (and other services; Craigs List, Ebay, MySpace, Email, etc) its a fact of life and there are better ways of dealing with them (see #4) than legal representation. In fact the code for something like Deans app is trivial (I'd post an example but too many can be easily found with Code Searches). Yes, at times, legal representation is a necessity but our sociciety tends to think that the law is always on our (the US in general) side and not the "bad guys" side. Legal representation should be held for use only when a common ground can not be reached through other means. Truth be told, the law is a very strict set of rules that harbors neither side and thats the way it should be. Let the angered responses commence. - Jeremy Darling PS: The app in #4 could easily be setup so that twitter users could mark an account as a possible spammer, once the account reaches a known threashold that account could then be auto-blocked. Also, when someone purchases the "auto-follower" software in question that persons ID could automatically be added with a higher count to the list, thus lowering the threashold for that user.
