Stop Twitter Spam

People who use the popular blogging social network MyBlogLog have recently noticed that MyBlogLog has taken the Twitter plunge. You can find their account here. At first I thought this was an un-official account - i.e. someone who just hijacked the Twitter account with MyBlogLog’s approval, but that is not the case here. Here is the blog post where they explain why they are on Twitter and how they plan to use Twitter as a communication channel. In the blog post, they acknowledge using a script to follow all MyBlogLog users who have supplied them with a Twitter ID. This resulted in almost 15,000 people seeing this email last night.

I did a quick scan to see what the general reaction was to being followed by MyBlogLog. One person claimed that he hadn’t supplied them with his Twitter ID. But if you look at his MyBlogLog page you’ll see that he has supplied them with a Twitter ID. Maybe he forgot?

Another person was worried that the account was fake or maybe a bot. Some were indifferent. Some said what took you so long? Some didn’t like the “auto-follow” technique that they used for their entry on to Twitter. And there were quite a few positive comments and people taking the position that this type of communication is OK because the recipients had willingly supplied MyBlogLog with their Twitter ID’s.

What’s really interesting about this “experiment” that MyBlogLog is doing is that we can tell right away how effective it is by looking at their Following:Followers ratio. As of the writing of this blog post, they are following 14,770 and there are 1,112 people following them, for a ratio of 13:1. I suspect that the ratio will improve as word gets around that this is a legitimate account and not a fake one.

My take on this? I’m a little biased on this because I use MyBlogLog (on another blog) and limiting the communication to people who use their service AND have provided them with a Twitter ID scores them some points. And I really like the fact that they have laid out their Twitter plans on their blog. So I’m gererally happy that they are using Twitter even though I’m not crazy about them using a script to find me. There is one suggestion that I’d like to make though. I went back to my MyBlogLog profile page and looked to see whether or not I had opted in for communications from MyBlogLog. I saw that I had opted in for ‘Email Notifications’ and ‘Community Messages’. Turns out that the ‘Email Notifications’ option is to alert me when someone leaves a message for me on my profile page. I have that set to ‘Yes’. I’m not exactly sure what the ‘Community Messages’ setting is but it shows up as ‘Email Opt-in’ for that. I didn’t see any communication preferences that were specific to social networking platforms.

So the question I have for MyBlogLog is:

Did you respect people’s email notification preferences when you followed everyone using the script?

I also think that MyBlogLog / Yahoo should update the Profile page to include opt-in / opt-out settings for the various social networking platforms that you plan to use. Or maybe just have a single setting that says something like ‘Can we communicate with you on social networking platforms?’.

Update:
Ian from MyBlogLog has responded to my question in the comments area.