Scripting News - Latest Comments in Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Dave Tufts — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:32:15 -0000

I think the logic for "spew factor" is way off...

Right now, Scobleizer's spew factor is 319,712,016, based on multiplying 25896 (number of followers) by 12346 (number of posts). The only way that would be correct would be if Scobleizer got 25896 followers BEFORE his first posts.

It also implies that all replies go to all followers, which isn't true either.

Neat idea thought.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Chris Brogan... — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:29:52 -0000

Crap. I knew I'd be up there. : (

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ben James — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:02:50 -0000

I just remembered that Twitter does RSS feeds too (duh) and I'm not sure how these fit into the architecture. I haven't seen their generation (as a separate entity to the self-proclaimedly content-management-style Twitter architecture) discussed anywhere yet.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ben James — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:57:26 -0000

I don't see how it makes sense to say that high-spew users are expensive for Twitter, rather than saying that the users who follow the high-spew users are collectively expensive.

If I've understood Twitter's current (original?) architecture correctly, it doesn't work like a mail system, i.e. tweets aren't copied to all of your followers as soon as you tweet them. They sit in a database, waiting for one of your followers to load their Twitter home page or make an API call through an app, thus pulling that tweet out of the database (or out of memcache, or whatever) once for that user. If you have thousands of followers then yes, eventually thousands of people will pull that tweet out of the database but unless they all check for new tweets simultaneously (which, with a limit of 70 API calls per minute, is unlikely), this shouldn't be a problem.

The fact that most Twitter API-using apps have a mailbox-like interface and only read each new tweet from your follow list once, then store it locally, might have contributed to a general misunderstanding of Twitter's architecture. You are still pulling those tweets; the people you follow are not pushing them to you.

So if all the above is a correct (albeit very simplified) overview of Twitter's architecture, then the real "expensive" users are those who follow huge lists of people (as 'jk' states below). I would guess that are far more of these than there are people with huge follow lists, because it's so much easier to follow thousands than it is to be followed by thousands. People abuse the follow action as a way to advertise themselves (and usually the website URL on their profile) for free. All you need to do is click random people on the 'Everyone' feed and follow them.

These people are an annoyance for non "power-users" like myself who have only a small number of followers, most of whom I know personally. I like to know which of my friends have caught the Twitter craze so I regularly check the new additions to my followers list. All too often, a new follower turns out to be the owner of some start-up website, who is following 25,000+ people yet has only a few hundred followers and is no doubt not at all interested in reading my own tweets so much as he is interested in me reading his or checking out his website.

As a solution to this follow-spam, I'd propose charging for huge follow lists, not huge followers lists. Let regular users follow a maximum of, say, 5,000 users. Then make a "Twitter Pro" account where that cap is lifted to a higher number or removed altogether.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Nathan Lanier — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:26:41 -0000

All I'm saying is that Twitter has specifically benefited from the early adoption by big names and power users. They're the ones that editorialize about, use it, and ultimately give it traction.

I don't disagree with you that it's outgrown that phase.... At any rate, it has a long, long, long way to go before it can say it's an essential/important service for people. Anecdotally, take a look at this:

http://google.com/trends?q=...

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

RatGeek — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:05:43 -0000

Hell Twitter should be paying him, because without the power users you don't have a service with traction.

What a crock. I didn't join twitter for any "power user" it's about communities of people (plural). twitter has outgrown *any* celebrity twitterer. It did long ago.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

MaryaB — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:20:30 -0000

Do you know that they were launched without a business plan? It seems like a social networking site with long-term goals for growth would have some sort of business plan...

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:08:09 -0000

Advertising is a form of charging for service - it's just hidden from the consumer.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Jeremiah Hoyet — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:58:35 -0000

You're right, but there are other ways from Twitter to make money without taxing their users. For instance, Twitter receives a large amount of Traffic every day, one small, well-placed ad could provide a very valuable source of income. (http://www.alexa.com/data/d...

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:04:23 -0000

I'm still not sure that power users are essential: What's required is power *promoters*. Scoble could subscribe to 10% of the number of people he does and still be a good promoter of the service.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Nathan Lanier — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:01:56 -0000

I was being facetious about paying him, but the point about power users still stands. The fundamental problem arises when a service like twitter launches internationally without a plan to scale and without a business plan.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

jk — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:51:05 -0000

Users who follow many users are the current large expense, not those with many followers.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:24:31 -0000

And when the VC money runs out... what then? Hope that someone will buy your wildly-unprofitable service?

It wouldn't be Google - they already have Jaiku, which can do everything that Twitter can do, and more. It wouldn't be Microsoft - they don't see the value. It might be Yahoo, but who wants to be bought by them at the moment?

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:22:45 -0000

Nathan, with all due respect, I think that's nonsense. Ask people to pay for what Robert puts out, and you'd see his susbscriber base fall pretty dramatically. Of course, that would also have the effect of focusing Robert on providing signal, rather than noise - so that might be a good thing :)

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Ian Betteridge — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:21:33 -0000

Perhaps because a service with no income stream won't remain in business forever.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Pro Blogger — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:17:17 -0000

They just need better servers and IT people ......

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Nathan Lanier — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:24:26 -0000

Hell Twitter should be paying him, because without the power users you don't have a service with traction.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Loic Le Meur — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:54:46 -0000

Hey Dave, good idea, could you add the $ spent in real time? Now that would be fun:
http://www.loiclemeur.com/e...

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Lawrence Pit — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:23:04 -0000

Why punish someone who attracts many followers?

Twitter going down so often is the best PR for Twitter. The amount of discussions about it around the net is unprecedented for such a small startup. Right now Twitter can afford this kind of PR as there is no alternative.

Indeed, Twitter doesn't need money, they don't even want it. Only getting the right people behind the code can solve the issues.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Jeremiah Hoyet — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:12:49 -0000

"Right now Twitter doesn't need more money."

Exactly! I'm not sure why people keep saying Twitter should start charging for service (in one way or another), it's not going to fix their problems.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

sull — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:57:30 -0000

no.

but they do need to seperate out the most popular users (10k+ followers/follow).
like a shared web host server needs to migrate and off-load the busiest sites so the "normal" sites dont get effected by intense resource usage.

regardless of how this is technically achieved for twitter... this would be the only emphasis i would place on the top users such as scoble and yourself.

maybe you top peeps can run your own twitter satellite servers ;)

charging money for the top users is a ridiculous idea and you already stated why. their is no solution in that. i'll have to go read malik's post to gain context but it's quire narrow-minded for twitter, inc. to even consider. twitter, as they state themselves, should only focus on the service and later, monetization can be realized.

(had to edit original sloppy writing while drinking).

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

narendra — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:48:51 -0000

Twitter should be letting people charge followers (and taking a cut) - http://www.nosoapradio.org/...

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Nando — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:00:45 -0000

Igedeon has a point.

Another one: after so many downtimes, charging Scoble as solution? Seriously, not good PR. ;)

3rd and my favorite one: limit the number of posts (as Twitter does with the number of characters). Per hour, per 10 minutes, I don't know. But do it. Dion Hinchcliffe made a quick survey last week and it appears that are too many updates out there, and they are disturbing people. That's the main complain. I believe a lot of people don't remove the too frequent updaters because they still feel they're useful, good, but it is not easy.

Twitter was built on the keep it simple philosophy. It should stay that way. Maybe its limits started as a fun challenge, but they're really the usefulness basis of the service.

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Dave Tong — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:59:36 -0000

Charging popular users makes no sense, as you rightly say. What Twitter ought to do is to go after the various people who are abusing the system. For example, link aggregator Newzof.com has several bots that combined have spewed over 100K tweets, and yet have almost no followers. My guess is that they rely on catching people who are using the Twitter "track" feature (which doesn't feature in your "spewage" calculation).

Re: Should Twitter charge high-spew users? (Scripting News)

Phil Windley — Mon, 26 May 2008 16:55:52 -0000

The trick is for twitter to figure out how to monetize this without discouragine spewage (as you'd defined it). Charging even microdollars in a group forming network leads to HUGE revenue.