Twitter Users – Self Regulating & Angry

Sorry for yet another post about Twitter, however, this is highly relevant to the last post. This week a company called Carson Systems, who do a number of things but primarily run some pretty amazing conferences in the Web 2.0 space, decided to run a competition on Twitter to win some free tickets to one of their events.

People have run competitions on Twitter before, so that is not unusual, however, this time they asked people to Retweet (RT) the message which contained a link to their website. This was seen by many, as essential spam, which if it became popular would potentially lead to your contacts on Twitter sending you marketing and promotional messages. There was a virtual uproar in response.

“Please retweet this to help me go to http://bit.ly/10Sgh
or http://bit.ly/4w7t (Rules: http://bit.ly/OxIK)”

Ryan Carson, the founder, has apologised on their blog, but you really need to read the comments. It is incredible how strongly people feel about Twitter and this issue. At some point though, Twitter has to figure out how to make money. Carson Systems has shown that clearly Twitter users don’t want to be advertised to, but would they pay for this privilege? I’m not sure. Would you pay for Twitter? Could you live without it now?