Twitter and Facebook each made missteps recently, alienating users with overly-strict enforcement of their terms of use.
First Twitter shut down StatTweets, a service that broadcast scores from college and professional sports games. Twitter killed the service after StatSheet founder Robbie Allen and his wife manually created 650 accounts, one for every team, over the course of a weekend. The behaviour, Twitter said, violated terms including “copyright infringement”, “mass account creation”, and “squatting”.
Then over the weekend, Facebook turned off the public profile for Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo, which had 2.85m fans. The page’s administrator had received tacit approval of the page from Mr Ronaldo’s agency, and wasn’t using the page to defame any other footballers. But Facebook shut it down because it was not administered by an official Ronaldo representative.
Both Twitter and Facebook are well within their rights to turn these services off. But it’s hard to see what gain either company can achieve from these heavy-handed tactics.
In the case of StatTweets, Mr Allen wasn’t spamming people or polluting the Twittersphere. Rather, the service seemed an ideal way to engage the sports community with Twitter. Between all the accounts, StatTweets had already attracted 63,000 followers. Similar services, such as StockTwits, are enormously popular and being promoted by Twitter itself.
As for the Ronaldo profile, it’s curious that Facebook didn’t try to facilitate a joint-administration agreement, as it did between Coca-Cola and the fans who created its most popular public profile. That arrangement has proven extremely successful for the brand, the creators and the fans.
Facebook and Twitter are both experiencing tremendous growth these days, and it’s understandable that the companies are trying to protect users, while at the same time providing a well-policed environment for brand managers.
But a more nuanced approach will be necessary to engage a social web that doesn’t see in black and white. While users may not want unsolicited ads pumped into their streams, that doesn’t mean they don’t want the opportunity to receive sports updates from the most efficient source, or friend a fake Ronaldo.
