The Social Media Revolution?

Some people think social media is a fad. It’s possible that the tools we know today such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so many others are fads. But is the trend itself going to fade? What do you think? Is it a fad a powerful shift in the way we communicate and consume information and goods?

I Have Been Untwittered

Update 2: This morning my account was restored. Yay! It appears it was human error. Go figger.

Update: Apparently I am not alone. It seems there has been a sudden influx of suspended accounts. So something is awry with Twitter. It’s not me.

Suddenly, this afternoon, I stopped receiving tweets in my desktop application (Tweetdeck). So I went to Twitter.com and lo and behold my account has been suspended. Say what? I hadn’t even posted anything today. Suspended on Twitter

That says: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.”

So, I quickly wrote to Support and got an automated reply. In case you’re wondering, here’s the reasons they give for suspending an account:

If you are suspended, it’s most likely for one or more of these reasons::

User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others’ timelines, passed off as one’s own

Technical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

I obviously hadn’t done any of these things. So, I waited a while but got no further correspondence. I checked the support page and it said my issue had been resolved! Except it hadn’t. Still suspended. So, I wrote another message in reply, re-opening my support ticket. 2 hours later, as of this posting, I’m still untwittered. Kind of an uncomfortable position to be in as I’m doing a talk on social media this week…There goes the live demo of Twitter.