Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Biz Stone reads my post!

Techcrunch reports on a email being sent to specific twitter accounts:

We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior
sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can
actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes
this activity disingenuous.

Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.

This is exactly what I have been saying recently about the "followers bubble". I've had others agree with me, while some (not to be named here) call out that it wasn't my place to say how they should use twitter. You're right. I have no control or jurisdiction over your twitter accounts. But the twitter exec staff sure does.

Yes, during my happy-dance, I did realize that this new policy will only relate to those few accounts using the twitter-implemented auto-follow, and do nothing for those who use external tools for this. But one can hope that this becomes a more strict policy, and I got a solution for that too:

Biz, because you such a nice guy, here is my free twitter monetisation strategy for you:

Relate the number of people you can follow to a pricing tier.

Think of the benefits:
  1. Keep the auto-followers under control, without needing to heuristically blacklist accounts.
  2. Only celebrities, companies and spammers are impacted, and they all got money.
  3. ...
  4. Profit!

This is possibly going to stir up some emotions, but think about this:
If you can honestly say "I think this person is interesting, so I am going to follow what they have to say", then why would you refuse to pay e.g. 1 cent per month for the privilege?