Just the other week I experienced two occurrences where Twitter was used by business for product support, which I’d like to share, for those who still doubt the power of social media. These are web businesses (UserVoice and Google) but that shouldn’t make any difference. Any business should monitor the Internet for their brand and reputation. I wasn’t necessarily looking for answers from them, but they did answer.
Earlier last week Google introduces a new version of their Profiles. I had set mine up, and using it I had a concern:
It was a rather generalized question I put out there for the twitterverse. I wasn’t expecting a response at all. Less than two hours later I did get a response:
Google obviously cares about their reputation and seem keen to keep track of whatever’s being said about them. Unfortunatly they didn’t include a link to their report abuse system, which would have been nice if I had a problem (which I didn’t). They could have pointed to a particular blogpost addressing these concerns, or they could create one based on these concerns found around Twitter or the blogosphere in general.
Then last Thursday at a workshop I was demoing a couple of my little web apps where I noticed that one was crashing Firefox and the other had a weird Firefox rendering issue (in effect duplicating the content, though view source only showed the content once). I quickly dugg around and uncommented the UserVoice script loading in those page, which seem to resolve the issues. I posted my concerns on Twitter, to see if anyone else had the same problem.

Two minutes later someone (who I think/hope is involved in UserVoice which wasn’t obvious) replied:
Since I had the UserVoice code removed and was at a workshop (and it’s not really critical to me), I told him I had fixed it for now, and would look at it again later, to which he let me know that I could contact him if I needed any more help. I did not have to go to a UserVoice forum to get help (I wasn’t looking for help actually) , as it could well be an issue with one of the Firefox plugins I have installed. But UserVoice cares enough about their reputation that they try to keep all customers (even little old me, even free customers) happy.
Twitter has been useful for me before in resolving (or sharing) problems. For example, when all my sites hosted on (MediaTemple) were down a couple of weeks ago, I obviously tweeted about this, and got responses back from other people having the same problems. Some of them then pointed me to the MediaTemple Twitter account which was giving out status updates on the cluster problems they were having, to which I then subscribed and got into the loop of how and when things got resolved.
Twitter is an open micro messaging platform which allows people to use it in any way they see fit (within the 140 character constraints). It’s a diary, a bulletin board, a self-help system, a publishing platform,… enabling real time search for events, brands, people… and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

Social paraSites
We already had online viruses and worms, now we got paraSites too.
The word ‘parasite’ comes from the Greek ‘parasitos’ (but then in Greek) which means ‘person who eats at the table of another’. In general we use parasite to refer to “an animal or plant that lives in or on a host; it obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host”. I first heard of web paraSites on the APWG mailing list, used by Russ McRee from Microsoft (working at Live Messenger looking for malware and phishing sites) to refer to a sites which are:
One such example he gives is finecommunity.com which bluntly asks for your Microsoft Live ID and has a very dry Terms Of Use at the bottom of the page, which nobody ever reads, and which ends with:
This is all too familiar on the Twitterverse. Due to the lack of a decent authentication api for Twitter (until recently, they now support oAuth, but the damage has been done), a lot of Twitter related services have popped up asking for your Twitter username and password. But even besides Twitter, other social networking sites would ask for your Gmail or Hotmail credentials to “find your friends” and “invite them”. This isn’t phishing (for your credentials), they just ask them from you so they could “help” you. There have been plenty of instances where these services would add spammy content and links to for example your Twitter stream, or send out emails to your contacts, automatically (because that’s part of the service they offer). Those too are what you could call paraSites, living off of your account.
Even right before I started writing this post I encountered such instance: the HP Touch the Future Now contest, which tells you to twitter about the future (or rather answer some weekly questions on Twitter) in order to win and asks for your Twitter username and password. The T&C doesn’t say anything about spamming your Twitter account. It does say if you don’t provide the required details, you’re disqualified. And that it may pass your personal information to related bodies corporate and agencies assisting with the contest. But why would they need your Twitter username and password? Just tell people to tweet and reply to @hp_<whatever>. Would you trust HP with your Twitter username and password? Didn’t people get bitten before by one of those other “services” wanting your credentials? This might well be a lack of understanding of social media on the part of HP and their marketing team, and they actually mean no harm (as in they won’t spam your Twitter stream). Or at one point in time they might just suck the life out of your Twitter account!