Update: Please see the bottom of this post for the latest.
I am feeling spurned. I used to follow my local news station, Central Florida News 13, on Twitter. A few days ago, I realized that I wasn’t seeing their tweets anymore. Anyone who knows Twitter knows that its performance has been a huge pile of suck lately, so I figured it was one of those Twitter bugs. I went to their page and it was full of garbage: pages and pages of the same nonsense message. Had they been hacked? Caught that Twitter worm?I tried to follow them about 5 times, but it wouldn’t let me. Broken Twitter. Nothing new.
Today I saw that they had posted a new update because someone re-tweeted it. So I navigated over to their page and found that they had protected their updates. I hit the button to request to follow them, only to be greeted with the following:
What the eff? They blocked me? Why? Why would they block me?
So let me ask: in what case does it make sense for a corporation or business to block a normal user. I must say, I am pretty upset, upset enough that I am seriously thinking that I won’t be watching channel 13, which I normally watch almost every single day, anymore. If they will single me out as someone who can no longer enjoy their service, why would I be a patron in front of my TV?
This is probably trivial and I should ignore it, but instead, I’m going to blog my new-found hatred for Central Florida News 13 and their Twitter team. Boooooooo!
So, knowing that doing so has lost them a viewer, does that make the world of Twitter a little scarier? Would people stop listening to a band, watching an actor, reading an author, if they expressed a feeling or idea with which the reader didn’t agree? Would companies feel that Twitter is safe ground knowing that tweeting the wrong thing or blocking a user could result in loss of business or audience?
Update, 4/20/09: Turns out it was – unsurprisingly – a Twitter error. I got a DM and a tweet from them, and they followed me. I can’t understand why Twitter can’t seem to get their crap together. You KNOW they aren’t getting as much traffic as Facebook. With $55 million+ in the bank, you’d think they could build the right infrastructure.
