On January 29, a large number of followers (including me) were dropped from Whole Foods corporate Twitter account. I was curious as to why this happened and what was being done about it.

I looked at the Whole Foods timeline and saw that the company was attributing it to a Twitter-generated glitch. I contacted Whole Foods via email, and Winnie Hsia, online community moderator, told me the company had sent Twitter a “Support Request (#16647) to address the issue … and shortly afterwards a Twitter staff member notified us that they were aware of the problem and currently investigating it.  At their request, on Feb 2nd we gave them a handful of user names of some of the folks who were unfollowed.

@WholeFoods did not respond to my questions either on the public timeline or by direct message, so I contacted the company’s PR people via the web site and received Winnie’s courteous and reasonably prompt reply.

I also exchanged emails with Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, in an attempt to find out what happened. He confirmed that there was a problem with the account but said it “was a cosmetic glitch on the number displayed on their profile page.” When I pointed out that I was among those unfollowed by Whole Foods the morning of the 29th, Biz said “I’d have to look at that as a separate issue.” I asked him on February 5 to confirm the root cause of the problem, but have not heard back from him.

I would love to hear something like “we had a corrupted database which has now been fixed” or “during the migration to newer faster servers, about x followers were accidentally dropped, but we are able to quickly restore them.” I think Twitter users, both companies and consumers, would feel better if the company owned up to the occasional IT problem and talked openly about its resolution.

Here’s why I think this all matters to businesses on Twitter. If you’ve been on Twitter for any period of time, you’ve experienced or heard tell of serious IT problems. In general, these have improved a great deal, and high marks to Twitter for improving availability and response times, and for smooth sailing during high load events like the Consumer Electronics Show when people tweet like crazy. Still, features like search and direct messaging get switched on and off or have limited functionality as Twitter IT people try to keep the Millennium Falcon of social networks running.

Where else do we tolerate so many IT problems? If a company like Salesforce dropped a few hundred contacts from a company’s CRM system, people would be really upset. Web 2.0 companies like Twitter should be held to similar standards.

I say similar, because I realize Twitter and Salesforce aren’t the same thing, but I also think the argument that “Twitter is free, so you should be grateful it’s there and stop complaining” doesn’t hold water. It isn’t free. Companies invest time, resources, opportunity costs and reputation by establishing and maintaining a presence on Twitter. This presence results in the creation of often huge numbers of connections (people who follow the company, people the company follows) which in turn increases Twitter’s valuation. So it’s not cash, but companies are not participating on Twitter for free.

Obviously, situations like this put companies in a difficult spot. In assuring me that Whole Foods values its Twitter followers, Winnie told me:

“We believe strongly that Twitter is a unique channel, allowing us the opportunity to listen to and respond to our customers, fans and critics in a way not afforded to us through other channels and we would certainly not intentionally shut down any of those voices.“

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Twitter. It’s one of the most powerful and amazing communications tools every conceived. I just think it still needs some clean-up and a little more professionalism before it’s viewed as a serious (and reliable) business tool.

Tags: Twitter IT problems, Whole Foods, Winnie Hsia, unfollow, unfollowed, Biz Stone, @WholeFoods

I can just picture Darren Murph at Engadget laughing out loud, tears of joy rolling down his cheeks as he wrote with unbridled glee about the shutting down of Ruckus, a music download service that catered to college students.

Murph writes:

“Ruckus’ homepage now directs to the image you see above, giving the four avid users no indication of whether any partial refunds or gratis hugs will be given out. Rest in peace, Ruckus — we’re sure you’ll find comfort in knowing that you were already dead to 99 percent of us.”

That’s some funny s***! Some people are probably out of work as a result of Ruckus’ closure. Investors lost money. Some entrepreneur’s dream has died. It’s a yuck fest all the way around.

I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. I know I comment on this WAY too often, but what’s the point of trashing a company like this? I don’t think it’s necessary. This kind of commentary isn’t funny or clever. It’s lame.

Tags: Engadget, Darren Murph, Ruckus

“We have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero — nothing, nada, zip,” writes Chris Anderson in The Economics of Giving it Away in the February 2 Wall Street Journal.

Semantics are very important here. Anderson chooses his words (I should say “word,” because “Free” is the title of his upcoming book) carefully. The price of nearly everything online is “free,” but not the cost. Anderson calls this “the business model.” People who love cheesy buzzwords call this “monetization.” I call it “a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.”

Anderson has done a great job identifying the most sweeping change in the free enterprise system in the past 100 years, the price which people are willing to pay for certain things, but has missed a key element. This idea that “digital goods” are free is an absolute myth. As my journalism prof said, “There’s no free lunch, only a few stale peanuts on the bar.*” What we have seen is not an evolution to “free,” but rather one in which the true costs of using many services are not as apparent as they used to be.

For example, even though you don’t pay to use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc., there is actually an exchange of services (use of the social network) for an easily determined cash value. Users of so-called free Web 2.0 services are making a tacit exchange when they sign up for a particular service, create a profile, build a network of friends, and contribute to the user base of that service. The user base is the chief capital asset of any social network or site, with a discreet dollar value per user. You have exchanged your valuable time and your friendships/relationships in exchange for use of the service. And if you’re at work, your employer is subsidizing that cost.

Anderson encourages entrepreneurs to innovate with new “business models” which, in some cases, involve charging for “digital goods.”

It’s interesting that Anderson mentions in his first paragraph that online music is free. While some emerging/independent artists are offering free music downloads, the music “industry,” both publishers like Sony Music and Philips Music Group, and distributors like iTunes and Amazon, have not gone “free.” Technology has made it so easy to perfectly duplicate music, that huge numbers of people have unilaterally decided music ought to be free and are downloading and “sharing” it without paying for it. There’s a big difference, however, between free and stolen.

Anderson is right, for the most part, that people are unwilling to pay up front for access to content and services, choosing instead to allow providers to extract cost/value through other less obvious means.

As John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, told NPR’s Terry Gross, free online news is “the only model that’s out there. I don’t think there’s an alternative… we’d have to go back in the time machine to try to change this, but the expectation online is that news is free, and that expectation won’t be altered.”

Indeed, we have seen massive changes to how information and communications are delivered and to what and how people are willing to pay for them. But it’s disingenuous to think that any of this is free. Nothing is free. Only the method of payment has changed.

* I have not given attribution for this quote because I found no reference to the “peanuts” version in my research and although some believe it was first said by economist Milton Friedman, there is much evidence that the quote is considerably older.

This post also appears on my Intridea blog.

Tags: Chris Anderson, Free, Web 2.0, Wall Street Journal, Myth