You Don't Own Your Tweets?

This may prove an important case: Staten Island Judge Sciarrino Jr. has just ruled that an Occupy Wall Street protester can’t complain that the police searched his tweets, not only because they’re public (fair enough) but also because he doesn’t own them. It'll be interesting to see what if anything Twitter says about this ruling. Twitter has previously warned folks when the authorities were reviewing their tweets.

The fact(?) that you don’t own your tweets though, if true, would seem to have potential ramifications for anyone wanting to repurpose their tweets or monetize them. By the judge's logic, do all photographers who upload their photos to Flickr lose ownership of them? After all, this is his flippant regard for the idea that anyone's data has a "home"on the Internet:

As a user, we may think that storage space to be like a “virtual home,” and with that strong privacy protection similar to our physical homes. However, that “home” is a block of ones and zeroes stored somewhere on someone’s computer. As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and held far away on remote network servers.

Now, Twitter may not care what you do with your own tweets. Still, this doesn’t seem like a helpful precedent. Does it mean that anyone could publish a collection of someone else's tweets, for example? That might be good news for some people, I suppose.

Also, an interesting side note: Judge Sciarrino was disciplined in 2009 for attempting to friend on Facebook lawyers who were scheduled to appear before him.

Recent Professional Writing

Something I've been meaning to do for a while. Here's a listing of my recent professional writing.

• "To Tweet, Perchance to Dream: Dismissing Three Twitter Myths," Scatter/Gather, February 28, 2012
• Interview: "SXSW 2012 Q&A: Matthew Diffee," Scatter/Gather, February 2, 2012
• "Autofail: How Apple's Autocorrect Teaches Bad English," Scatter/Gather, October 7, 2011
• "How Egypt Got Her Voice Back," Scatter/Gather, February 7, 2011
• "Your Content Is Showing," Scatter/Gather, December 30, 2010
• "Robosketching for the People," Scatter/Gather, October 15, 2010
• "A Bah-Bah-Bah Blog Blunder?" Scatter/Gather, July 22, 2010
• "Cheaper Than a Bag of Popcorn," Scatter/Gather, March 18, 2010
• "Order Out of Nothingness: Tagging 101," Scatter/Gather, January 12, 2010
• "News That's Fit to Tweet?" Scatter/Gather, November 13, 2009
• "Blinded by Content Bliss," Scatter/Gather, August 3, 2009
• "Here Comes User-Generated Content," Scatter/Gather, July 28, 2009
• "Cultivating Effective User-Generated Content," With Bob Maynard, Razorfish.com, July 2009 [pdf]
• "Crowdsourcing Content," Scatter/Gather, April 22, 2009
• "Auto promotion: Using Twitter in the automotive industry," Headlight Blog, March 30, 2009
• "To Fabricate or Not to Fabricate," Scatter/Gather, March 12, 2009
• "Mind Your Micoblogging Manners," Slant, December 2008 [pdf]
• "Let ‘em talk: How dealership employees use message boards and what can be learned from them," Headlight Blog, October 28, 2008

Minding Your Microblogging Manners

My new article "Mind Your Microblogging Manners" is live on Slant, Razorfish's newsletter on the intersection of marketing and technology. (Link to PDF.)

The opening couple of paragraphs follow:

If you have any doubt about the impact of Twitter as a powerful forum for communication, talk to the folks at Motrin. In mid-November, Motrin pulled an ad aimed at mothers – or Motrin Moms – from the homepage of its Web site after scores of angry moms protested on Twitter that the ad slighted them for using baby slings. As a result, Motrin had to restructure their site after taking it down for part of the day.

Arguments followed as to whether Motrin should’ve pulled the ad or not. Perhaps, some argued,
they overreacted to a vocal, if highly organized (thanks to Twitter), minority of voices.
Regardless, the episode is another milestone in Twitter’s growth and proof of the economical
power it affords. Instead of smarting at the impact of the medium, companies would do well to
embrace it, as a powerful and economic means of Social Influence Marketing™.

Twitter Works

Sitting in the departure lounge for my flight to JFK at Dulles airport outside DC I posted the following to Twitter at about 5:30pm:

JetBlue you scanning Twitter? 3:45 hr delay? This makes about 5 bad experiences. The small diff in price ain't worth it.

Sitting on the plane a while later - still stuck on the tarmac - I checked my email to see the following message with the timestamp of 7:35:

Hi, Robert A Stribley.

JetBlue Airways (JetBlue) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out JetBlue Airways's profile here:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue

You may follow JetBlue Airways as well by clicking on the "follow" button.

Best,
Twitter

Now, I will say that JetBlue put us on the plane about an hour and a half earlier than they'd earlier than they said they were going after they'd discussed the delays. I won't pretend to know that that had anything with my efforts - especially since the plane still ended up taking off at about 8:45, about 3 hours and 45 minutes after it was originally supposed to. But it does indicate at least that JetBlue knew what I was thinking at the time - even before my flight took off. So in that sense, Twitter worked for me.

Update: JetBlue responds to my post here in comments within 45 minutes. I'm impressed with your responsiveness to social media, JetBlue, if not always with your service!

Related: Summize search for Jetblue

Nothing New

The Economist notes that Twitter is being used by journalists during election coverage as a tool akin to cablese, which journalists used in the early 20th century.

The Economist also recently noted that the first occurrence of spam was probably in 1864, when British politicians received telegrams in the middle of the night, which turned out to be advertisements for dentistry. They very suitably annoyed, much in the way we were to get phone calls from MCI at dinner time or Viagra ads in our email. (Oh yeah, still get the latter.) It's hard to think of what life was like before the phone, but you can imagine:

In 1903 the trade journal Telephony reported an elderly woman's complaints about her niece, who received a phone call from a male friend while dressing. “The two of them stood talking to one another just as if they were entirely dressed and had stopped for a little chat on the street! I tell you this generation is too much for me,” she grumbled.

Telephone protocol also differs around the world: in parts of Scandinavia, people text you first to get your permission to call (I kinda like that), and in Japan using your phone for spoken conversations on the train is verboten, although phones work there. If we get connectivity on the subway here in New York (and you can guarantee we will), I hope that's a custom that's appropriated here, pronto.

Related: NPR's News Blog Twitter feed | New York Times Politics feed