twitter fail blog

Twitter can be wonderfully self-correcting. We were alerted to such an event today by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @ephant, who sent us an alert about @megturnr who was dropping big bird bombs on twitter:

Yup, the same message to tweep, after tweep, after tweep:
Interested by widgets? Look at this new kind of widgets alerting you on your desktop (url) Cool a?

The Fail Bird put on his editor hat while reading over my shoulder: No one is interested BY widgets. They may be interested IN widgets. “New kind of widgets” should not be plural, and, “Cool a?” is so wrong, I’m not even going there. (He stomped off in disgust, dropping pinfeathers everywhere, muttering about the dumbing down of the English language, what’s wrong with schools these days, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, yada  yada…)

Fortunately, he didn’t have to deal with @megturnr himself. Just like how the unsightly, empty house at the end of the block, rotting on its foundation, spurs the neighborhood to action, the twitter community banded together to do something about their latest spammer.

If you’re reading this @megturnr, you might want to take the friendly advice offered by some of the many people you annoyed. Twitter is not about advertising, it’s making connections and building your reputation. What you’ve done is start off on the wrong foot, which may keep you limping on twitter just long enough to get suspended.

When someone sends spam, or acts in another socially unacceptable way, it makes us suspicious of anything they say or do. The widget may be good. But, we trust word-of-mouth, and @megturnr’s mouth spews crap, so we believe her product must be crap as well.

After getting big pile of negative response, ole Meg posted something new:

No, we don’t. Not at all.

Buh bye.

Send in the Fail Bird! Tell them you saw them on Twitter Fail