Should You Validate Your Twitter Following?

I followed someone today on Twitter, a real person in fact I had just had a coffee and a long chat with them.  Nothing new there I agree but within seconds of committing the follow I received a Direct Message from a service called TrueTwit asking me to validate my profile.

The premise of the service is that by asking all new followers to jump through a few basic hoops (captcha’s and such) TrueTwit can validate that the profile belongs to a proper person rather than a spambot.  Seems a smart enough idea providing some provenance but it got me thinking…

1. Do I really care if accounts following me are real people or bots enough to ask new followers to place a barrier to them following me?
2. By not validating oneself as a person how does TrueTwit preclude that account from following other than by simply applying a “block”?
3. Even blocking a profile does not prevent an account on Twitter from @ replying anyway as it is not follow/following dependant.
4. What about those bots I actually want to follow me, those which I use for automated functions?

What would be more useful to me would be the ability to validate those that I wish to follow, or at least selectively.  Of course the problem there would be akin to the first point above, “do I care if you follow me enough to validate myself to you?”

Any thoughts on Twitter or any other SocNet validation usefulness?

Was Vodafone’s PAYG Outage in Bad Faith?

Not being a VF UK user I was a little late to hear that apparently their PAYG topup mechanisms were out for the weekend – probably the busiest period of the week for PAYG users.

Mobile operators are not known for being the nicest of fairest of companies to deal with I know but given the ubiquity and essentialness of their service in modern life it does seem a little poor on VF’s part to not allow normally willing paying customers just to utilise the network whilst VF fanny around with their billing systems.

eBay’s Nutty UK Pricing Premium

In the US from June 16th one has been able to list 5 items free a month.  Well not entirely free as the offer only extends to the insertion fee itself – a saving of $0.75 is still a saving.  Without further analysis is does look a lot like the offer is actually not that special as there is a flat rate 8.75% success fee on those 5 items and I seem to recall it was previously tiered.

If anyone has a copy of the pre-June 16th fees I’d love to know what they were.

But that’s the US.  I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something.

In the UK that free listings offer is no where to be found on eBay’s site, and to make it worse eBay actually charge:

• tiered insertion fees ranging from zero for < £0.99 items to £1.90 for items over £100 and multi-list items,
• success fees are a flat rate 10% with a maximum of £40.

If I sold a bike for say £200 (c. $300) here’s how the regional pricing works out…

It costs 21% more to sell the same item through eBay in the UK than in US.  Is the US offering less of a service, well you could easily argue a bigger audience should mean more potential bidders so should really command a premium.

But the reality is there is NO difference in the offering from eBay that I can discern other than a 21% premium for living in the UK.

And who said the internet was breaking down international trading borders?

I have 2 eBay accounts; one in the UK (where I live) and one in the US which serviced our New Zealand address more effectively.  Neither are highly used but just occasionally I want to buy something or in the case of now need to sell something, but…

I’ve talked about eBay’s listing and success fees before on Twitter but having received an email today offering up free listing insertions I thought it best to write down just what eBay are doing with pricing and where I think they are going horribly wrong.

In Marketing Privacy Legal Compliance is Never Enough

News hit the feeds today that, rather unsuprisingly, BT has dropped plans to run with the behavioural tracking company Phorm.   If any (marketing) company ever wanted proof positive where privacy is concerned that the will of the masses has greater authority than merely being legally compliant – this is it.

BT helped to develop Phorm and the system adheres to the UK DPA (if not the EU), consulted with the Home Office to ensure their position but screwed up by breaking the social norms in place by the community at large.

But BT did what any commercial entity would have done and ditched the system (irrespective of it’s worth or value) when it was apparent that their ability to retain Customers was severely hampered as trust had broken down.

In a world so acutely (albeit not always accurately) sensitised to security and privacy issues it never ceases to amaze me that companies believe that just because legally they can do something means they should.

GizaPage – Shame About the T&Cs

Launched today into public beta, GizaPage is hoping to reach the holy grail (in my view) of social network self management, the Social Quarterback – a single place where one can update each and every social network, manage contacts, profiles and all that goodness without having to jump from site to site. It’s a little like chi.mp but with some added, and rather useful functionality. You sign up, add the services you want to use (choose from about 40 or so including all the main SocNets), import contacts and you’re presented with a neat tabbed UI providing access to each service. Great, I’ve been banging on to people I know about having a decent Social Quarterback for a couple of years now and we’ll see if GizaPage can live up to the promise.

BUT

Concern #1 – Sign Up is a Lousy UX Sign up is yet another account creation form. Why no use of OpenID or even Facebook Connect? When will sites learn that having another account for managing sites is not the smart route?

Concern #2 – Onerous T&Cs You know that innocuous little “I accept the terms” check box we all just bypass to get at the goodies. Well, don’t just yet. A few months back Facebook tried to grant themselves a license to do what they wanted with anything you created within their walls. The crowd cried foul and Facebook recanted. Well GizaPage have done it as well. Just look at section 9 of the T&C’s. Lurking in there is subsection 9.3 reading as;

posting User Content to any part of the Website, including any third party service rendered “tabs”, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to GizaPage an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid up, worldwide licence including the right to sublicence, to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose.

Aside from the simple fact that GizaPage is providing merely a conduit for this information to the site of one’s choice (granted a quick and useful conduit) their Privacy Statements make it quite clear they won’t be sharing this content with any one else.

This granting of a license is odd, when actually using GizaPage the creation of content is actually done on the original service site – displayed within a frame. Technically here you are NOT creating your content on GizaPage’s site (you do when editing permissions, over all profile pages and such), so anything you do say against Friendfeed should not fall under their license – in theory at least.

Concern #3 – A Right to Change Terms So why grant themselves a license? Seems harmless enough but also hiding in the T&C’s GizaPage grant themselves a right to change those terms at whim and without notification.

Can anyone else see a problem here?

I’m off for a play with the site BUT I will be careful what content I create for now, at least, until some clarification over these T&Cs is made.