Rockfish Interactive’s Michael Paladino On Monitoring and Deleting Tweets: TidyTweet
At the end of the 140tc conference I was able to sneak in one last interview with one of the winners of the 140tc Developer’s Contest — developer / inventor, Micheal Paladino, from Rockfish Interactive.
Michael shared with me the impetus for the invention. At Rockfish Interactive they build websites that pull in social media elements, one of which is Twitter feeds. The development of the Tidytweet was instigated when a site that was pulling in a certain hash tag which had been spammed. That spam ended up on the client’s homepage. So Michael came up with a monitoring engine. They quickly realized that this would have value to other people and they began to expand their development of the idea.
I asked Michael about the concept of moderating Tweets. The trend in social media is to allow people to state their thoughts, openly, honestly, authentically and genuinely. This means that if someone makes a comment on your website, your community or in Twitter, the protocol is not to just take it down because it is embarrassing. Rather the protocol is generally to allow it to stay posted. And the company is left to decide to respond and interact with the feedback.
Michael said that if someone was to do a search on a particular hash tag, that information is still in the cloud. Some of which the company might not want. What TidyTweet does is control what makes it to the client’s web page. They filter out bad language and clear attempts to maliciously destroy a brand. Michael says that is NOT an attempt to discourage honest dialogue in the cloud. Rather if someone is bent on ruining a company by continually posting horrible things, then that’s the point at which companies might consider this product.
On well run community sites, companies have established some best practices on posting as part of their welcome package they ask newcomers to read. Perhaps something similar needs to be adopted for other social media channels. Perhaps if the comments are in the tone of “I’m frustrated, please help me1” Or “I mad as heck- and here’s what would be better if…” then those are genuine dialogues companies will be impelled to interact with. Certainly no one wants to be attacked or spammed- and that kind of behavior may not be what companies in Twitter or other channels want. It’s our cloud- our community – just like we would not litter, we might consider negative spamming in the same light.
Click here to hear more about Michael views this interesting topic. Do you agree or not?
Click here to hear about Michael’s point of view on keeping websites clean….
You can follow Michael on twitter at www.twitter.com/mpaladino
And learn more about this product by following the product on twitter at www.twitter.com/tidytweet
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I guess you can’t be called paranoid if they’re really out to get you, but that may be what people sense when they realize they are being sorted through some arbitrary “practices” in order to express themselves. If the Internet is what we think it is, it will sort out whether this is the way people allow themselves to be categorized, or it will force the type “A’s” to look elsewhere to sling their slanderous rants. This is all part of the evolution to find the perfect blogger. We know you’re out there, and if we can’t find you, we’ll just write an app. Keep in mind though, you may throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, “color” is often what causes critical mass. Mastering the middle ground is an art.