The SocialOomph Solution for the Twitter Slap

I had just upgraded to the Pro version of SocialOomph (formerly called TweetLater) when Twitter got after them for allowing and facilitating repetitive tweets. They have now disabled that feature.

According to SocialOomph:

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, Twitter communicated to us that recurring tweets are in violation of their Terms of Service. Twitter’s rationale centered around the potential for recurring tweets to result in duplicate tweets.

The content of the communication is extracted for your benefit below:

Recurring Tweets are a violation no matter how they are done, including whether or not someone pays you to have a special privilege. We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever- They pollute Twitter, and tools shouldn’t be given to enable people to break the rules. Spinnable text seems to just be a way to bypass the rules against duplicate updates and essentially provides the same problems.

Hence, from Thursday, October 15th, 2009, 00:00 AM CST we will prevent the entry of recurring tweets on Twitter accounts within the SocialOomph system. Existing recurring tweets on Twitter accounts will all be placed in paused state at that time, so that the content of the tweet text is still accessible to you, but no publishing to Twitter of those tweets will take place.

Recurring tweets scheduled for other social services are not affected by this change. Other scheduled tweets are also not affected by this change.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, but it is important to us to keep our system in good standing with Twitter.

That’s very unfortunate. It was a very powerful and useful feature. It was, also, the sole reason that I upgraded from the free version of the application.

Twitter has been likened to a cocktail party.  You roam around the room, talking to various people.  The conversation is fast, loud, and varying.  Everyone tries to be interesting, funny, controversial, intelligent, etc.

How many people have told the same joke more than once to different people at a cocktail party?  Almost everyone, huh.  Some even tell the same joke more than once to the same person.  Oops!  They will let you know of your goof and move on – no harm done.

What if you are only allowed to tell the same joke only once?  Now, everyone who was out of earshot when you told it the first time is out of luck.  I think it’s a shame that some might be left out of the opportunity for a good laugh, a clever insight, an encouragement, or some other useful piece of conversation.

That’s the usefulness of recurring tweets.  It isn’t spam.  Everyone who see’s your tweets has followed you, meaning that they have opted to receive your messages.  You still must be cautious.  If you get out of control and begin to repeat incessantly, share objectionable material, or talk about things that your followers aren’t interested in, they will simply unfollow you (opt out.)

So, If SocialOomph was going to discontinue the option to retweet, my first instinct was to find another service to replace them.  With a quick Google search, I discovered this list of Tweet schedulers.  I have to admit that I haven’t tested any of the options on their list, yet, but from the descriptions they provide, it appears to be a very useful list.

Before I had a chance to do any research on the services in that list, I found that SocialOomph already has another option.  I’ve outlined the steps in another post.