Wednesday, October 29, 2008

NashMash Adds Opt-Out Options

Today, the developers of NashMash over at 365 Creative have added a variety of opt-out options for people whose accounts end up on their list of Nashville area Twitter users. Among the options are: not being followed when the bulk follow is processed, not being included in the new randomizer that displays a Nashville Twitter profile at random, not being available to be the featured user of the day, and, lastly, not being included on the public list.

While this is a drastic improvement over the prior situation, I would much prefer to see this as an opt-in list rather than opt-out. This is especially true for accounts that are marked private and I hope that the developers will consider making at least this change. I do like the granularity in the opt-out choices, as they provide reasonable options for finding a comfortable level of participation.

Clearly, the developers are looking to retain as many people as possible on the list, but given the amount of ill will generated yesterday, I'm surprised that they haven't issued a more public statement. A simple post to the website explaining their intentions and apologizing for the inadvertent public launch of the service might go a long way to ensuring that people don't opt-out in droves. It might even gain them some support. Nonetheless, I do appreciate them providing information about the service to me and their willingness to post comments here.

What say you?

Jump

3 comments:

  1. And why exactly would I give my Twitter password to someone who has put me on a list of 1600 other unknowing, unwilling potential twitter spam victims?

    I think I'll quit while I'm behind. I don't believe in collecting random followers like baseball cards.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The auto-follow feature is offline until we give people enough time to opt-in to being followed. We have changed everyone on the auto-follow list to being opted out. Thus, people would have to opt in to get followed.

    The following mechanism and the huge public twitter list featured on http://urli.us/h are two different things. You are opted in to the list by default because anyone could go on summize or use the find people feature on twitter to find you. In fact, thats exactly how we get the list compiled. You can opt out of the list if you wish by doing so on the Follow Nashville page on NashMash or following the instructions linked below.

    We have added opt in/out features both from NashMash and through Twitter. Instructions on how to manually opt in/out are at http://urli.us/wxw

    I apologize people took offense to what the app was doing, it is an ever-maturing concept that shouldn't have been released until later. Hopefully we can make amends with those of you who were offended by the application and you can stick around to see the cool organizational mechanisms we are developing.

    ReplyDelete