This Caught My Eye...

Our rules-based DM system is extremely flexible, allowing you to create any number of rules, which, when triggered, will send personalized DMs.

Our purpose in offering a rules-based DM system is to help ameliorate the problem of DM spam. We believe that by offering a robust system which allows you to send DMs based on specific criteria for each DM recipient, with the further ability to personalize the message to each recipient, we help eliminate the problem of "dumb" DMs that are blasted out to every follower without regard to their particulars. That said, as with any programmatic system, we do require that you read our rules of the road when it comes to this feature.

To fully take advantage of our system, please completely read the following important instructions...

Basically, we're talking about a "mail merge" kind of function for auto DMs. I just got one that was so poorly conceived, it immediately raised red flags...

"Rebecca Leaman You've been on Twitter for 811 days. What's your favorite thing about twitter?"

So of course I went looking for the script wot dun it.

Tweetspinner's new "beta" feature seems to be the most likely culprit. Users can craft lovely little "personal" DMs to go out automatically to new followers, inserting a variety of variables. They can choose to insert your first name, your last name, your location, the number of followers you have, the number of days you've been on Twitter, any url in your Twitter bio, etc. -- whatever info is public via the Twitter API -- to create the deceptive impression that the auto-DMer might actually notice your existence.

Sure, we can merrily unfollow the more blatant auto-DM abusers, like the guy who sent me the "811 days" auto-DM - but that's not the big problem I see here.

The big problem with this pseudo personalization is that now we've got to start wondering about the more subtle uses.

And now I'm starting to wonder about some of the other DMs I've had recently that addressed me by my first name, for example -- how can I know for sure, now, if any of those was a genuine greeting, typed by someone who noticed my following them and actually checked my Twitter profile before DMing me. Was it someone genuinely eager to connect with me, or just a new-and-improved auto DM in action?

Feeling duped? Why, yes.
Yes, in fact, I am.

Internet Marketing Gurus may beg to differ, but I don't think this is at all a good thing for the future of Twitter.

Cynicism level: 11.

... and when Hart is bored at work, we get to share the, er, joy...

Although I blogged about my skepticism for social technology just a few days ago, tonight I had an epiphany. Instead of waiting for traditional news outlets to get a crew on the ground to tell me what had happened, I saw and heard from Haitians reporting their own tragic reality via tweets, twitterpics, ireport, facebook, blogs and skype. It was timely, it was raw, and it was truthful.

I like the refinement this chart brings to Chris Brogan's widely adopted view of the social media world as a network of "outposts" around the "home base" (for most of us, our blogs). It reminds me of the Earth's water cycle - you know, the one you had to sketch out in your Grade 5 notebook? Evaporation, transportation, condensation, precipitation, all those other -ions, round and round and round without end. Only, presumably, in social media the drops of INPUT are filtered through a human mind and combined in some sort of wonderful alchemy, rather than simply running off the top of a sun-baked asphalt parking lot or percolating down through layers of silt to get pumped back up into your tea kettle and eventually flushed... Well, perhaps that's extending the water cycle metaphor just a bit too far. FLOW. That's what I was getting at here. FLOW. It's a process that gives purpose to the absorption of all this endless information. And somewhere there, between the blogger's brain and the post pages of home base, all that input is synthesized, analyzed, altered, improved, and generally rendered into something fresh to be pumped out the other end to all those waiting outposts, ready to be absorbed into some other blogger's ecosystem of reading and thinking and writing... Nice colours, too.

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