It's funny how much of a difference a week can sometimes make. Especially in the Twitterverse. Case in point, my relationship with Twitter Inc.
A few weeks ago I had registered several Twitter accounts for use in an upcoming Twitter application — Tweet20. I'd registered accounts like: @tweetyes, @tweetno, @tweetoffer, @tweetwant and @tweetlocation.
But it turns out that if you register too many accounts concurrently, the Twitter spam controls are triggered. So a little while after the accounts got registered, I found to my surprise that most of them had been suspended!!
Slightly surprised at why non-spam accounts would get suspended — most of those accounts hadn't even been used and were too recent to count as name-squatting! — I got in touch with the Twitter folk and made my case.
But on the first go, my appeal got rejected and the issue was closed. After being pissed off momentarily, I told myself off for depending on other people's platforms and got in touch with the Twitter support staff who had closed the issue.
Del Harvey (@delbius) turned out to be quite pleasant to engage and after a little while, my accounts were re-enabled. Woo!!
In the meantime, I had been helping out Ryan Williams (@ryanwi) on the Twitter-Dev list with getting Twitter OAuth working on App Engine. I put this out as open source for others to use — tweetapp — and promptly forgot about it.
But, much to my pleasant surprise, not only did it get picked up by a Google App Engine Product Manager, Mike Repass (@mdrcode), but Alex Payne (@al3x), the Twitter API lead made the statement you see in the above image — which I discovered whilst reading the GitHub blog!
And thus in the course of a week I had gone from being treated as a spammer by Twitter Inc. to being appreciated by one of its leading members. Down and up we go!
Lesson to take away from this? Just keep on providing demonstrable value and you will be rewarded positively.
Have you had similar turnarounds with other organisations? Or perhaps even with Twitter Inc. too? Let me know in the comments!
