14 DAY TRIAL // With all the recent talk about Twitter spam and trending topic abuse and with many people asking it to take better preventive measures it looks like the micro-blogging service is finally doing more than the usual automated blocking, which has been known to be largely ineffective, as Web development company Moonfruit claims that Twitter is keeping the hashtag #moonfruit artificially out of the top ten trending topics.
“Late Friday night 3rd July, around midnight UK time Moonfruit finally tumbled off the top of the trends list on Twitter. Now this wasn’t wholly unexpected with July 4th on the way and the resignation of Sarah Palin. But what was odd is how it that it never returned despite the stats being above other trending topics,” Moonfruit founder, Wendy Tan White, wrote on the company's blog. “So if Twitter had come to us and said, “guys, enough is enough”, then we would have worked with them to limit the campaign, or complied with whatever they were demanding. However, if they have pulled the trending without explanation or communication, this sets rather a different tone.”
The company has been running a marketing campaign on Twitter randomly giving away 10 MacBook Pros to Twitter users who include the #moonfruit hashtag in their tweets. The campaign was set to take place between July 1 and July 10 with one laptop awarded everyday. However, in light of the latest developments the company decided to end it sooner and give away the remaining four MacBook Pros today. The campaign proved a massive success keeping the hashtag in the trending topics since it was launched but it also sparked a lot of controversy. While some people lauded the company for its inventiveness and the original campaign others considered it nothing more than spam and were vocal about having Twitter do more in these cases. It now looks like the latter got their wish.
This particular case may not be the best example of hashtag abuse as the company didn't expect and intend to have #moonfruit lead the trending topics and push other, arguably, more important ones like #iranelection out and it fully agrees with Twitter's decision. Moonfruit does, however, object to the way it was carried out and is right to do so as there still is no response or official word from Twitter regarding the move. While everyone agrees that some steps in cutting down on the spam in Twitter are urgently needed it would be much more beneficial for the company to issue some clear guidelines and take a stand on the problem rather than do things behind closed doors.