Dear reader,
a word of caution about the use of twitter:
In general twitter is a good thing so the author after an initial trial period started to like the usefulness of putting out at least some shorter headlines combined with a link to the article. He also liked the opportunity to subscribe to some news channels who put out quite some constant stream of news. So by following some channels a constant flow of news came in but soon he discovered that not all really important side-stories were tweeted by the news outlets or they were "just" out of timeline (too "old") in order to get detected by the not that sharp eyes of the follower in question.
So in order to fill the gaps he used again thee good old Google news service and searched there for some stories which were at the time quite "hot" and put those to twitter by copy & paste of headline and link to the full article only added with some date stamp, short indicator what language and subject hashtag (such as #euro, #efsf etc.). This was done just manually and not by any tools and besides that it seems be common practice of all those news channels who still haven't programmed an api software for putting out there latest articles automatically. So for some weeks it worked pretty well and i have to admit the output of articles reached boiling points on the events of Eurozone summit to solve the big Greek debt crisis while there were reports on latest developments on the net. This evening where the 50% haircut deal for Greece was hammered out was also the evening where my little FD news channel suddenly was muted. So timeline was suddenly frozen and all followers were gone (=>0) also all following (=> 0 after some 240 before) and most shocking all the 1400+ tweets which have been put on the twitter channel before.
One of the initial intentions of those tweets was to form a database with high quality links not only to news articles but also to some background information. So this intended database filled during the usage of twitter quite fast and automatically but had its shortcomings when trying to go back to far in timeline. But that little disadvantage was nothing to be suddenly confronted with a total loss of every tweet every made under this account.
As a clear indication of something seriously happened was a yellow box displayed on upper edge of front page of twitter account reading: "Your account has been suspended.. if you want to contest it use this link" (out of my recollection) So while being still shocked of course one followed that offered lifeline to ones rescue and was redirected to a form in order to describe the problem. So whatever came to mind what could have possible led to this sudden suspension of service was put in this plea and it was send to twitter service.
Just after that immediate action one started to use good old Google in order to find out what might have triggered that nasty situation being "frozen". So it produced some results with some helpful descriptions of twitter user who also had the misfortune before and managed mostly successful to get their control back but some of them had to wait quite a while before things were straightened out. Conclusion out of many of those individual descriptions was that contesting is needed and if not immediately successful some follow up might be useful but not with flooding the support with e-mails. You will find some of those links later in the references section of this story.
While log in was still possible only this ominous yellow box was display on the top of page and several displays of the number 0 made it quite frustrating. Although confident that the reply to the twitter support may work it was time to accept that in future a more cautious use of twitter might save some time and also frustration in case this ever happens again. So that was the idea was born to start this blog instead in case of a permanent loss of service or additionally in case of just temporary loss of service.
Even after exchanging some e-mails with twitter support it was still not clear until the very last one with announcement that service had been restored after being mistaken for a spam bot. This salvation came after almost a week. Others reported just a few hours of suspension and some even longer suffered from twitter free time.
According to the twitter guide of how to use twitter properly it is still some space for interpretation of what exactly is to be avoided or how many tweets per day, hour , minute are still OK and what would trigger suspension according to Twitter rules.
So it was suggested to the support employee that they should give at least some indication to future "victims" of suspension at their individual twitter start page why they have been taken out and perhaps not kill all functions but at least put them into "read only" mode in order to be able to get latest messages but being unable to do any harm to twitter.
To be honest the author wouldn't like to find out if this unpleasant downside of twitter service will be improved or not ;-)
to be added:
some useful links
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