Cyril Hanquez › Likes

agree, I have seen enough of the same messages to promote Magpie - Erno Hannink

Shouldn't all Twitter clients do that (FriendFeed included)? - Atul Arora

He could dO. I'm lucky enough not to have seen any yet, but I'm likely to block the user first, given it makes me question everything else they have said - Rachel Clarke

The reason you think you can block it now is because magpie was kind enough to add the #magpie designator. Once they have sufficient attention, magpie will be able to drop that designator, and you'll have to have something very sophisticated to block them. I would suggest that magpie evolve to let each ad publishing user choose his or her own designator before ads. - Mason Lee

Mason: just give me a crowd sourcing algorithm. I'd gladly tell an engine what's advertising, just like I do with Akismet. - Robert Scoble

Also, intelligent filtering, beyond a tweet here and there, is not something that Twitter clients will be able to excel at under the existing architecture. Since Twitter limits the number of requests a user can pull down, they pretty much have the architecture set up so that the real power sorting/filtering has to run on their end. That's where the data lives. - Mason Lee

Interesting convo - I looked very closely at Magpie and decided I didn't want to toxify my tweets to my peeps with ads they didn't ask for. - Mari Smith

If Twitter thinks magpie is a violation of some Terms of Service they can always try to block the magpie IP addresses, or delete user accounts suspected of using magpie. The realistic options aren't all that great as far as I see it. - Mason Lee

VOTE: Yes - Chris Nixon

As Jesse Stay just mentioned, an even better solution to this is to have a system-wide filter in TweetDeck (to complement the existing column specific filters) where the user can filter out any particular combination of words - Magpie is certainly not the last twitter advertising attempt - Iain Dodsworth

Yep, a system-wide filter is better: you would be able to not display tweets containing some keywords (like #magpie). The filitering could be done client-side without any major problems I think. Correct me if I'm wrong Iain :-) - Cyril Hanquez

Robert, interesting! A crowd sourced tweet-block would be tricky, though. How would you recommend it work? There is nothing about "users advertising" that says the advertiser even has to insert any sort of "#tag" at all. So would we block based on the the actual content of the tweets, looking for the tweet to appear from many different users and assuming those are spam? And we are doing this in near-real time? Hmm. - Mason Lee

Iain, the blocking would have to by highly dynamic. If you "block" all tweets that start with #Ad, well, you can be sure I'll just change to start my advert tweets with some variation of "I heard x" or "I saw this cool link: x" etc. There is no easy stopping this. Ad blocking on the web looks for banned IPs. But if the ad comes directly from the host you are visiting, as in a tweet, it's much more tricky to block. - Mason Lee

I don't want to filter out #magpie tweets, I want to unfollow anyone using the system, mainly because I don't like what it does to Twitspace. Filtering allows magpie to continue unaffected as its effect is undetectable. Unfollowing people, which reduces audience in a measurable way, will help mapgie die. - Dave Pook

Dave, I agree. The twitter "free market" will sort this "problem" out. EDIT: "follow free market" - Mason Lee

Mason, I think that it would be up to the tweetdeck user itself to decide what he's considering as a spam. What could be done is to have a "spam column" in tweetdeck like the direct or reply ones where all tweets marked with a certain spam keyword go to that specific column. In this way, you can still have a look at them, just in case... - Cyril Hanquez

In any case, tweetdeck need to retrieve those tweets first before filtering so it's more a matter of displaying them or not than really blocking. I think the word blocking in that case in not appropriate - Cyril Hanquez

There's definitely scope to develop an app (or functionality within an existing app) which monitors your friends timeline for #magpie tweets, presents you with a list of your "friends" using magpie and gives you a big UNFOLLOW ALL button :-) - Iain Dodsworth

Cyril: Well, this is speculation on my part about where this ad market would go, but there's no "keyword" at all to filter in an ad that looks like this: "This could be an interesting conversation: http://tinyurl.com/5mhgxv" - Mason Lee

and about to change the #ad to something else, if I'm a subscriber to that service, I won't be really happy if the rules change without prior notice. And to finish, it's your followers who are using those ad service, so when it's too much crap compared to interesting tweets, then just unfollow them :-) - Cyril Hanquez

With everyone talking about blockers for magpie, may I ask what would make ads in Twitter actually acceptable for you? We do accept ads on blogs, some even post entire articles to thank their sponsors. Shouldn't there be a way for tweeps to do the same? I believe that there are a lot of Twitter users out there who work hard to provide a real service to their followers. They should be rewarded, somehow, I think. Thank you for the feedback! (I am the CEO of Magpie & Friends Ltd.) - Jan Schulz-Hofen

The way magpie is working at the moment is IMO acceptable. It really depends on your follower who is using the service : if he setup magpie to send tweets every 2 messages, it's maybe a bit too much, which could justify to unfollow him. Now if it's 1 for 10, that's fair. Maybe you could setup an acceptable limit based on the number of tweets done by a user ? - Cyril Hanquez

Hey Jan. #magpie seems like an interesting idea to me. If followers don't like it, they can unfollow, right? I guess it does potentially wreck things like "Trends" etc. If I were Twitter, I would have some terms of service that say if any tweet does not originate directly from the users voice or fingers (e.g. is automated) it must carry some meta-data mark, like "X-not-human: true". But, alas, Twitter has no metadata. It's a pretty lame messaging protocol in many respects, I have to say. - Mason Lee

Cyril: could you describe how such a limit would work? Thanks for the feedback! - Jan Schulz-Hofen

Duh.. you just check how many tweets the user did since you last inserted an ad? ;) It's a good idea Cyril. - Mason Lee

Why unfollow when you can just filter? Why not let those that want to sponsor their tweets do so? (Disclaimer: I'm trying it out just as a case study - I'd hate my trying out a service to cause half my followers to unsubscribe from me) - Jesse Stay

Mason: very interesting! that option would count for twitterfeed and the alikes as well, I suppose? we've started today with giving our users the choice of a personal disclaimer. this is giving ad blockers a hard time i agree, but we did it mainly because users were unsure what the #magpie hashtag meant. if there was a x-not-human meta-data attribute, I guess we would use it. - Jan Schulz-Hofen

Jan, oh, you did let the users create their own alternative tag to #magpie? You call it a "disclaimer"? Damn, and I thought I was thinking ahead of the curve there. :) Yeah, there's no blocking this beyond terms of service agreements as far as I can see. The free market for followers will sort it out. And BTW, way to create a controversy there! :) - Mason Lee

@Jesse, dangerous, if I was following you, you would loose me instantly! Magpie makes you *lie* from your twit acct, look at this tweet from them "#magpie Just checked out XXX.com - trustworthy classifieds", it makes a statement on behalf of the tweeter that is untrue, that is not good. - Dave Pook

Jan, you can calculate the average tweets/month of a user and let's assume that a maximum of 1/10 of those tweets could be used by an ad service with a minimum of 1 tweet/month. - Cyril Hanquez

ex. 200 tweets last month -> max. 1 "adtweet" every 20 tweets - Cyril Hanquez

Dave, my point being enabling default unfollowing based on simple keywords itself is dangerous. I'd likely unfollow you if I found out you did that. If I go in and try out a service as a blogger to see what it's like, I should be able to do that, just as you should be able to filter me out as I'm trying it out. - Jesse Stay from twhirl

Jan, listen to Dave there. That sort of ad he cites is disingenuous. Its publisher deserves to lose many followers. I like the idea of an ad agent that would insert "A word from my sponsor: example.com is the place to be." after I had pre-approved the ad. Maybe a user would do bulk approvals? - Mason Lee

And also worth pointing out are points 2 and 3 from Twitters terms: 2)You are responsible for any activity that occurs under your screen name. 3)You are responsible for keeping your password secure. @Jesse you are right, I would never use an autounfollower, there are many non magpie users who use the mapie hashtag in posts - Dave Pook

dave & mason: we acknowledge that ads vs. personal endorsements are an issue. that's why we introduced the pre-approval feature yesterday. you can choose to hand-select every magpie-tweet before it gets aired in your timeline. - Jan Schulz-Hofen