Never Was a Truer Word Used than TrueTwit…

First there was email… hooray;
Then there was spam… boo;
Then came spam assassin – let me hear you say ‘huh?’ in unison. Exactly.

Twitter Verification?

Seriously, though, we find it intensely frustrating to be forced to interact with a service when there are perfectly good services already available that do this for you automatically. So, unless we must, we don’t use these services. It doesn’t make us think “wow, this user really gets the Internet”, it makes us think the opposite.

For what Spam Assassin has not done for email, we predict that Truetwit will also be as unsuccessful for Twitter.

What is It?

TrueTwit claims that it does the hard work to ‘validate’ your Twitter followers so you don’t have to. This is wrong, they don’t do the hard work – the people who are forced to validate through TrueTwit do – again, and again. Just because they chose to follow you on Twitter.

Of course, they can also get a TrueTwit account, but this is only feeding the troll (as it were).

Let’s Go Back to Basics – What is Twitter?

There are three immediate issues with TrueTwit which make it even less compelling than web-based email verification:

– Firstly, twitter accounts are already ‘validated’ to a certain extent. Now this doesn’t mean that some use ‘bots’ to post and reply to emails. Many people do… the irony is, of course, so does TrueTwit and it’s users, and

– Secondly, Twitter is not a private messaging system, it’s a dip-in, dip-out collaborative medium, and

– Thirdy, what is the problem with having followers who may not be reading your ‘Tweets’ with their own live eyes there and then? If you don’t like your messages being read by others, then why use Twitter in the first place?

Let Sense Prevail!

So, what next for TrueTwit? Well, that depends on whether its forcible signup process gains enough traction in order to become pervasive or whether common sense and the ‘sit back and use your brain cells’ logic will prevail.

Our hope is the latter, of course – but we’re not sure. Although happy to hear a compelling argument for the value that TrueTwit brings to the web… anyone?