Comments on: Faux Viral Maketing

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:52:40 +0000

I absolutely hear you, Daniel. Why should you Tweet about a site before even seeing how it performs?

Vicki, I hear you — you were basically “opting in” without knowing, though. Pix.ly was the same way.

I’m not using any more Twitter services that require me to enter my username and password to access the API. In fact, I think the Twitter team should start banning applications that abuse the API in this way.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:31:10 +0000

I’ll stick to http://search.twitter.com to track mentions of my name in public tweets.

By: Jé Maverick

Jé Maverick — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 06:14:17 +0000

Problem solved. No private login informationneeds to be provided. Check it out: http://replies.twitapps.com/

By: Vicki

Vicki — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:59:32 +0000

Tamar – in order to “opt in”one should have to _check_ a box. The requirement to uncheck a box is a default opt-in with an ability to opt-out.

Worse, several people have reported that the “opt-out” feature doesn’t seem to be working.

The default should always be Quiet Please. Let _me_ decide if I want to recommend a service.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:44:16 +0000

Tamar, I know that I checked the box to opt out of “supporting” them at the time I signed up, so I at least thought I was opting out. But that didn’t stop it from sending out a message as me. Perhaps it was a bug or a browser issue. Regardless, there were no details about the nature of the support.

In any case, I agree wholeheartedly with your observation, as should be clear from my post.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:34:45 +0000

Just saw your trackback on Brian's post. I'm pretty certain that you opted in, but perhaps you didn't know that you did. Here's my observation (also posted in Brian's comments).