As for those who “complain” that there are a lot of politics in Twitter lately, my question is:

aren’t you following those people voluntarily? I have clicked on “follow” several times and then deleted those people because their tweets didn’t interest me or angered me.

I thoroughly enjoy the variety on Twitter; and just like anything else, I “scroll through” the tweets that don’t interest me, and click on links that interest me. I follow several international Twitters and have several international followers.

Not only do I learn a lot and often get some laughs; but I’ve gotten 2 jobs in three days just this week; because people have clicked on my Tweet and seen what I do.

Just MHO.

Well, I’m using Twitter from Spain. I have lately a new kind of followers who are in fact spammers. I think this is the natural evolution of spam. You Know, new ways of communication-new ways of spamming. Now, I got a question: Is twitter selling traffic ? I mean, you talked about election but what do you think about twitter spammers?. One of this “followers” is a spanish website about leisure time.

http://blogactionday.org/

Now that’s a worthy cause.

Personally, I have to say… I’m not sure why that Election Bar is such an annoyance to people; although that’s only my own perspective, obviously each to their own.

Are you suggesting that businesses cannot provide proper links to other businesses with whom they have financial dealings if they feel their customers would benefit just in case Google don’t like it? Surely these recommendations are the very definition of a good link?!

As for having the election bar, I’m a US expat in Europe and I can’t say it’s bothered me at all. I had a brief look just to see what people were saying and haven’t been back in. It’s really just a bit at the top of the page and is far less obtrusive than your average Adsense or banner advertising so, whatever.

I didn’t care much of it on plurk either. However, with plurk they allowed you to close the tab, it was hidden away at the bottom of the screen, and it remembered your settings. The only way you’d know about it is like with me if you appeared on the US Election feed accidentally, and get a bunch of Obama/McCain haters flaming you (I mentioned that I was watching a documentary on Michael Palin – it picked up on the word “Palin”). :S

Change it to a Premiership Football ticker debate, then I’m interested ;)

I don’t think Twitter needs to worry about their page rank and how high they come up in the search results. The whole model is orthogonal to search – it doesn’t really matter, I would think.

If they are going to insist on putting these pulse point up then it should be a streaming ticker that rolls across the top and includes all ppt.

1) No, the current.com link is not paid for. We thought, since many people were likely to watch the debates anyway, they may want to know about where they can watch it with a Twittery angle. (Current displays Twitters on the screen.) We just thought this was neat. Current is also linking to Twitter, but there is no money involved (or even a formal business deal). In fact, they didn’t even know we were going to do this.

2) “promotion” is the CSS class we’re using to style that box. We’ve always called those deals in the sidebar “promos,” so that just made sense to whomever coded it up. We’ve never sold links (as of yet).

3) The Election bar not staying away if you hit the X is a bug. Sorry about that, thought it was fixed. We don’t want to force anything on you you’ve said you don’t want to see.

4) If you’re sick of hearing about the election and/or are not in the U.S., I apologize. If we’d had more time, we’d have limited who saw these promos. But this is all just off-the-cuff stuff. We figure the election is important enough — and so many people on Twitter are already talking about it — we want to support those conversations.

But don’t worry — it’ll all be over soon! (I can’t guarantee, however, that we won’t point out other topics, sites, or Twitter account that we think a lot of people might be interested in — but that *you* may not be. Someday, some may even be paid for — but we’ll let you know.)

Thanks for your feedback,
Evan