The issue with the way this site approaches twitter, and many other sites fall into this flawed design pattern too, is that in order to participate I have to oAuth my twitter account and allow the site to tweet something.
Once you get over, say 1000 users, you become mindful of spamming your followers. I'm fortunate to have a fair more than 1000 and my partner has a degree of magnitude worth of followers again - if you were doing this all the time it would effect ones twitter followers.
Some of the streaming sites like Justin.TV and UStream encourage users to participate in a chat room via twitter and it totally ignores that all of this will be spam to 99% of the followers. It's a design pattern that should stop.
That's a good point. It's set up so folks can edit their tweet, hopefully making it more relevant to more of their folks, but how many followers will really be in SF or the Bay Area?
A motivation for sites like sfmayorvote.com is that Twitter (and maybe Facebook statuses) potentially offer a new way to measure and visualize public opinion. That's a goal that has huge implications for democratic governance, marketing, etc.
But I'd say Twitter has some design flaws that really limit its usefulness there: for instance, the fact that you can't have both public and protected Tweets on the same account, and the fact that it's not easy to be selective with who receives your Tweet. I'd love to see the Twitter folks add good functionality to address those issues.
If they (and I'm looking at this site in particular, but it applies to anyone using that design pattern) actually wanted to fix this they'd have the tweet be a reply to @sfvote (or something like that), as opposed to a stand-alone tweet. Doing that would allow your tweet to show up in search results - which allows counting and gauging of opinion - but would only show up to your followers who are also following @sfvote, to whom the tweet would probably be of interest anyways.
The downside of this, from their point of view, is that it makes it much more difficult for the site to really spread (which is clearly their intent). People running this site _want_ your whole contact list to be able to see it (because it opens up a whole new wave of person-to-person advertising) so that more people use it, regardless of how your followers would treat the information.
Maybe add an option along the lines of "Do you want to send this to all your followers?", but even that wouldn't really be in the site's interest.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 19.9 ms ] threadOnce you get over, say 1000 users, you become mindful of spamming your followers. I'm fortunate to have a fair more than 1000 and my partner has a degree of magnitude worth of followers again - if you were doing this all the time it would effect ones twitter followers.
Some of the streaming sites like Justin.TV and UStream encourage users to participate in a chat room via twitter and it totally ignores that all of this will be spam to 99% of the followers. It's a design pattern that should stop.
A motivation for sites like sfmayorvote.com is that Twitter (and maybe Facebook statuses) potentially offer a new way to measure and visualize public opinion. That's a goal that has huge implications for democratic governance, marketing, etc.
But I'd say Twitter has some design flaws that really limit its usefulness there: for instance, the fact that you can't have both public and protected Tweets on the same account, and the fact that it's not easy to be selective with who receives your Tweet. I'd love to see the Twitter folks add good functionality to address those issues.
The downside of this, from their point of view, is that it makes it much more difficult for the site to really spread (which is clearly their intent). People running this site _want_ your whole contact list to be able to see it (because it opens up a whole new wave of person-to-person advertising) so that more people use it, regardless of how your followers would treat the information.
Maybe add an option along the lines of "Do you want to send this to all your followers?", but even that wouldn't really be in the site's interest.