Update: Over at Hacker News, malte pointed out that http://stat.us was one of the original domains considered for Twitter: Screenshot

Ugly Details

Back on May 4th, I chronicled the unfortunate situation of Twitter suspending all of the StatTweet accounts because I supposedly violated their terms of service.  Today marks the 2 month anniversary since Twitter suspended the accounts. I've decided to stop trying to get the accounts re-enabled despite their popularity (63,000 followers). Why? In short, because dealing with Twitter Support has been a nightmare...worse than my worst experiences dealing with cable and phone companies (and I've had some bad ones).

We can argue whether I violated their TOS and to what degree, but you'd be hard pressed to condone the way they've treated a developer that was simply trying to create an innovative service on top of Twitter.  From the first day I was very open about my intentions with the accounts and my willingness to change to meet their needs. Typically the kind of reply I'd get back would be a restatement of my TOS violations. I'd reply that there was a misunderstanding and my reasons for it. I'd get a reply back that they were "reviewing my accounts". This went on and on for 2 months! It was always a 1-way communication. This includes an email I got from @ev (Twitter CEO) after my story ran on TechCrunch (he never replied to my subsequent replies). It took me 7 days to create all the accounts and start populating them. Each account is virtually the same...just the team is different.  There is nothing to review!  Yet week after week they said they were "reviewing" my accounts.  And it often took up to 5 days to get a response to my email (if they responded at all).

Then out of the blue they asked for copy of my content licensing agreements (for stats and news).  WTF? They never said they had an issue with the content of my tweets before.  They gave me a fax number. They wanted me to send them a confidential corporate document to some fax machine that who knows who had access to with no promises that this would actually resolve the issue.  It is clear now that much more was going on behind the scenes related to this issue than they were letting on.

Finally, three weeks ago I was told that "SOME" of the accounts would be enabled the next week (ie, two weeks ago).  Guess what?  Didn't happen. I sent an email asking why and got nothing back.  I sent one last email asking for an update. Nothing. Why some and not all? Who knows.

I know everyone is real busy at Twitter. Yada-yada-yada.  At least with the cable/phone company, you can call someone up directly. You may get the run-around, but at least it is a human on the other end you can talk to. With Twitter, you are lucky if one of the support people decide to grace you with a form reply in 5 days.

They turned a 1-day issue (or 1-week at most) into a 2 month ordeal. Even if they didn't want to re-enable the accounts they could have just said so instead of dragging this out and being so unresponsive. All I was looking for was a little open communication.  That's what Twitter is supposed to be about, right?  Twitter corporate culture seems very anti-Twitter to me.

Adversity creates Opportunity

It is all for the best. I've never been one that needs much motivation, but this is the kind of thing that really gets me going. I'm moving full speed ahead with my own solution to the problem StatTweets was trying to solve. Real-time information is all the rage now and I'm going to provide a solution in the sports space. I recently acquired the domain stat.us and it's a perfect name for the service I'm building. I can't wait to share more in the coming weeks. Signup over on stat.us if you want to be informed of future updates.

Posted by Robbie | Permalink | Comments

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