Gary Andrews

During my journalism training days, we once joked what journalism would have looked like had the internet not been invented. I facetiously commented that some reporters would have to find a method other than using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

Joking as I may have been, with staff numbers down and pressure to produce rolling content on the up, there’s a lot more churnalism and reliance on syndicated agency content. Much as journalists would like to be out and about, exposing wrongdoing and reporting original content, modern demands make this kind of hard.

As such, there’s a lot of copy and pasting from other sources. If one paper, radio or other media source carries a story, others will take the main line and reproduce this, namechecking the original.

Actually, this isn’t a new thing. It’s sort of vital for the news industry to exist. One outlet will look slow if they’re not leading with the line obtained by their rivals, so often they’ll take the main points and rewrite into their own news story. It’s pretty common and generally accepted practice in the news industry. Whether it’s a practice you feel is proper journalism is another question (although it’s quite a skill to be able to rewrite agency copy well).

Where it isn’t accepted is in the blogging community, which is much more open to quoting, attributing and, most importantly, linking back to the original source. As somebody who’s been blogging in various guises since in 2003, this is nearly second nature to me and something I’ve carried into online journalism without any problem.

But when two very different worlds collide, there will be problems, and this was the case earlier this week. Gav Stone, who writes the specialist Les Rosbifs blog, focusing on the careers on English footballers abroad, pulled off something off a coup by securing an interview with former England, FC Twente and Wolsburg manager Steve McClaren about his time managing in Europe.

Let’s just emphasise this. A fully independent blogger who edits his site as a hobby and no typical mainstream access secured an interview with a reasonably recent England manager and who is still active in the game today. Unless it’s part of a PR event, these type of interviews are unusual on independent blogs and rarer still to be in such depth.

Understandably Gav was, to put it mildly, a bit miffed when a chunk of his interview turned up a few days later as a lifted and rewritten news story (“Macca: Twenty joy my career high) on Sky Sports, Team Talk and other sites that Sky had syndicated the story to.

After emailing and receiving no response, Gav called them out on Twitter. The response from the journalists on these sites was a mixture of defensive, patronising, a tad arrogant and one that showed very little understanding of the web.

Chief among Gavin’s complaints was the lack of a link back to the source of the story. Team Talk et al had credited the interview to Les Rosbifs (although with no explanation as to who or what the site was) and hadn’t linked back, and hadn’t asked permission to use the quotes in the first place. What started off as a slightly miffed request from a blogger has escalated into a stage where lawyers are being consulted.

To my mind, there are four different aspects to this: the moral and ethical and legal implications of Sky’s actions, the issue of proper crediting, the issue of hyperlinking, and the general attitude of a mainstream media publication towards an independent blog.

Morals, ethics, and legality

Legally, Sky were probably just about on the right side of the law (although my own copyright knowledge is somewhat hazy). The fair dealing exception, whereby content is used for comment or rewritten is very common in journalism, and largely expected among media organisations – getting a paper or news bulletin out would be nigh-on impossible without it.

It’s also worth pointing out Sky didn’t, technically, steal the interview. The articles – now removed (in itself curious given the robust defence of their methods offered by Team Talk members on Twitter) – did lift several lengthy quotes from Les Rosbifs. However, the news angle was changed, there are some (admittedly, not many) original words in the pieces and much of the context and depth provided by the original interview wouldn’t be apparent without reading the full original piece.

So, setting legal concerns to one side (and it would be interesting to see if any lawyers think Sky overstepped the mark and the piece was problematic legally, the moral and ethical concerns still come into play. And largely politeness too.

Had Sky approached Gavin for permission, it’s likely that the response and conversation would have been much more amicable. But that in itself causes problems. As Tom Phillips commented on my Google+ (subscribers only, sorry), permission is an odd thing. Many bloggers quote from the mainstream press liberally. Should they contact the journalist or publication every time they want to write their own article based around somebody else’s work. The idea seems somewhat absurd when turned around, even if it is good manners.

But it still somehow feels wrong, ethically. This isn’t a writer working in the cut and thrust of journalism, this is a blogger who has done this work in his spare time, and now sees somebody else profiting from the work he has done. The attitude of some of the journalists working for Sky was far from classy and left something to be desired. Gav wasn’t playing with the big boys, who was pursuing an interest.

One final point here. Gavin secured the interview with McClaren on the basis that he was not mainstream press. When McClaren’s quotes (perhaps to be expected, and perhaps a small touch of naivety on both McClaren and Gavin’s parts) found their way onto Sky, that hurts the relationship built up by Gavin.

Relationships between the media and many football figures are touchy at best. By trampling over Les Rosbifs’ interview, Sky have strained that relationship between McClaren, the press and bloggers just that little bit further.

In the credits

From Sky / Team Talk’s point of view, they’d credited Les Rosbifs. From their perspective, that was it. The credit, though, isn’t entirely clear who or what Les Rosbifs is. The credit simply reads “In an interview with Les Rosbifs…”.

Be honest here. Unless you were a football blogger or happened to know Gav personally, would you know what Les Rosbifs was? For all was made clear, it could have just as easily been a French cooking blog that happened to have interviewed McClaren about nutrition, and wider football issues.

Gav himself has said there’s been no real spike in traffic and other articles that have appeared on other sites haven’t even carried Les Rosbifs’ name. That credit may work fine for, say, The Mirror, but again, feels disingenuous in the context of Gavin’s site. Should you wish to find the whole interview, there’s no indication how to go about this (and remember, many readers are lazy).

But where the issue really becomes important is that of hyperlinking.

The links effect

The hyperlinking issue is where we can see clear effects, differences between Gav and Sky, and, on the part of Team Talk, a complete misunderstanding of how the internet works.

Mark Holmes, one of Team Talk’s journalists, first told Gav on Twitter that Team Talk knew how to credit properly, but then went onto express amazement as to why anybody would ever request a link to the source material in a post. This is somewhat staggering from an online journalist.

I’ve written in the past how hyperlinks are one of the most valuable pieces of currency on the internet. From the most basic point of view, it’s just good practice to link back to your sources – it provides an easy way for readers to find the original in one easy click, shows how much has been taken and is an open and transparent way of acknowledging original material.

Adding a link is quick, easy (and wouldn’t, unlike Mark Holmes claimed, add 10% more work to Team Talk’s day) and good practice, and helps deliver more traffic to the original site. Personally, I’d like to see all agency syndication include links to sources in their copy – and it’s up to the site to decide if they want to link or not.

But this is just a small part of the benefits of linking back to the source. Had a site like Sky or Team Talk, with a high trust ranking in Google, linked back to the original article, then this in itself would provide an excellent virtual form of payment to Gav and help boost the SEO for his site and especially the McClaren article.

By not linking to the source, this becomes more of an issue. Some time after publication, the Sky article ranked higher than the Les Rosbifs article in Google. Not only had Sky lifted a chunk of the interview, it was now benefitting in search terms. Even entering LEs Rosbifs into search saw Gav’s site rank lower.

Mark Chalcraft at 2nd Yellow has written about the implications of duplicated content for bloggers in terms of SEO and Google ranking. What, to a big site, may seem like an insignificant link actually has big implications helping deliver hits to smaller, independent blogs (I’m personally of the view that all sites should link to source material, unless there’s a compelling reason not to).

This is why, to me, the issue of crediting online shouldn’t just be a throwaway line about the origin. It should be clear, transparent and include links wherever possible. Not only does this benefit the reader, it benefits and rewards original material with minimum of effort.

But you’re just a blogger…

And this all comes back to the original attitude of several Sky journalists, who seemed amazed that the blogger they’d taken the content was rather persistent in asking for a link.

To say Gavin wasn’t being professional and should be more polite when asking for a link back to content they’d taken from his site in the first place is not just patronising, it’s incredibly arrogant. Without the legwork Gavin put in, there would be no story at all.

We’re frequently told the boundaries between blogging and journalism have broken down. This is true to an extent. When everybody from the BBC to ITV to the Guardian to the Telegraph blogs, you can safely say it’s a valid medium.

The boundaries between bloggers and journalists, though, have still, if this incident is anything to go by, most definitely not broken down. Gavin’s interview is a well researched and written piece of journalism, although he’s not a journalist. The rewrite is only tenuously journalism insofar as it’s published on a journalistic platform. Yet it is the latter who are seen as the gatekeeper still.

Team Talk and Sky will always get the bigger hits, but that’s not what this is about. Les Rosbifs is niche, and makes a virtue of this. The work is just as valid this way (and, if anything, more impressive given it is written outside of a day job). There is a hierarchy in terms of page views, yes, but not so much in status.

Should bloggers expect to be compensated when their work is lifted? Debatable. I’d say proper, fully-linked crediting isn’t a bad payment.

Should bloggers be asked to have their quotes used elsewhere? Again, possibly. These aren’t, strictly speaking, journalistic publications. There is no established culture of lifting and rewriting content, thankfully. There is more of a culture of openness, transparency and respect for source material and this is something journalists would be well advised to be mindful of when using independent blogs as a source.

Was it stealing? In my view, no. I have nothing against the practice per se, even if I don’t necessarily like how lifting is a commonplace tactic in the industry (copy and paste is, after all, hardly journalism). It’s a necessary evil, sadly.

But even though it isn’t stealing, in the legal sense of the word, it is, overall, poor form, and reflects badly on Sky and Team Talk, both for the initial perceived transgression and subsequent attitude towards the complaint. What could have been sorted quickly and easily escalated into something much more unpleasant. Social media crises have been created for brands out of less.

As with so much on the internet, it comes down to a judgement call. It is absurd to request permission from every single source, every single time (although there is absolutely no reason for not crediting and linking to them). But if the site is a small, independent blog like Les Rosbifs rather than one of your main competitors, it hurts nobody to use a bit of politeness.

Who knows, if they’d asked nicely, they may have even got an original piece of content from Gavin, based on the interview, which would have been a win-win situation for everybody (ok, maybe not necessarily with this particular content. But it’s an entirely plausible scenario).

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging and journalism, journalism ethics, Les Rosbifs, Sky, Sky Sports, Steve McClaren, Team Talk

If anonymous commenting on the internet had a users guide, then one of the more sensible pieces of advice would be “Don’t do it from your work PC.”

It’s advice a commenter on the previous post would have been good to consider. I don’t make a habit of running Whois searches on the IP address of every commenter but, given that this place doesn’t get that many trolls or sockpuppets, and given the subject matter, I was a bit curious. Turns out the IP address was from one of the (many) PR agencies who’ve pitched me this World Cup.

Fail.

My first instinct was to blog about it. Look at me! I’ve found another PR person not getting online! I can call them out and it’ll add to the legions of PR fails!

Yes, that would have been fun. But what would it really achieve, in all honesty?

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming – it’s always struck me as a little counter productive. And, frankly, it the grand scheme of things immature PR leaves childish anonymous comment on insignificant blog isn’t really up there with war crimes.

After sleeping on it, I felt less comfortable with the idea of outing the agency. After all, one employee isn’t representative of the whole company.

The thought also occurred that if this had been a piece of journalism for publication I would have at least made an effort to get the accused’s side of the story before going anywhere near the publish button. And if, as I’ve often said, bloggers aspire to be journalists, then they should hold themselves to the standards journalists have as well. Even if journalists regularly fall short of these themselves.

So I emailed the director of the agency, who emailed back promptly, with an invitation to talk over the issues on the phone, which I did.

And I now consider the matter to be at an end, and I’m really satisfied with the response (and no, I didn’t demand any action against the perpetrator. It’s not my place to tell a company how to conduct their own HR).

Why? Because ten minutes on the phone was productive. The director came across as very switched on and took the issues seriously. I came away with a very favourable impression.

What’s more, we both agreed to keep each other’s contact details. They’d contact me if they thought it would be useful, but would also take me off the general mailing list, and I know that there’s somebody at the agency I can contact if I’m writing stories on certain topics, which I may well do in the future.

A win-win situation, really.

So, what’s the lesson (other than don’t try and post childish comments on a blog during work time).

While there’s a lot wrong with PR, there’s also a lot of good, sensible people working hard in the industry, doing their best to make connections with bloggers. And to a certain extent they have to tread on eggshells while doing this.

A wrong move with the wrong blogger, no matter how well meaning or unintentional and you can find yourself passed around Twitter, mocked by all and sundry. There’s no guarantee that if you catch the blogger on a bad day with a bad move, they won’t take umbridge and blog about it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with calling out bad practice, when appropriate.

But it did make me stop and think. How many bloggers have burned bridges or got themselves a reputation for being difficult for happily blogging PR fails.

Yet could they have improved things and actually developed a good long-term relationship with a good contact if they’d taken a step back and tried to resolve things behind the scenes first. It’s not as if anybody was going to beat them to publishing it, in a lot of cases.

One line from an old news editor of mine always sticks in my mind – “[Competitor x] may be first. But we’re always going to be right.” In other words, I’d always prefer to take a while longer to establish and verify the facts rather than rush to publish. Today was no different. I’m glad I did.

I consider today’s conversation confidential, although I think it’s worth quoting one line from my conversation. As an agency, I was told, we’re committed to treating bloggers the same as journalists.

I like that, I think it’s a good attitude. It’s something I’ve said roughly the same in the past, although you obviously have to make allowances for the different medium you’re working with.

And although bloggers are very good at calling out bad journalism, both blogs and journalists can be even quicker to call out bad PR – whether it’s justified or not – or calling out anything they consider wrong in general.

I’ve seen plenty of examples over the last couple of years where bloggers and PR have got into very public spats over something that has always struck me could have been dealt with without having to go public.

There’s a lot to be said for making an effort to build contacts and relationships rather than losing it quickly (although equally you can say that PR in general could avoid a lot of these issues if people from the industry didn’t continue to make elementary errors).

I’ve always maintained that others should be treated with the same respect you’d hope to be treated. I’d like to hope that, God forbid, should I make a similar fail one day, that the blogger has the good grace to contact me and give me a chance to talk over the issue before hitting publish.

I’d be interested in hearing your views on this one. Do you think bloggers hit publish too quickly? Should they blog first and ask questions later? Or is it only fair? What would you have done?

I don’t think there are any right answers, personally, but I’m very glad I took the time to contact them. Given the chance I’d much rather try and work on developing a relationship rather than kill it before it had the chance to succeed or fail.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogging, journalism ethics, pitching bloggers, PR

Ding! Another day, another poorly worded and conceived pitch arrives in my personal inbox, and my heart sinks a little further towards despair. If it weren’t for the Germans, and Portugal’s goal fest against the North Koreans, I’d have received more useless pitches than goals this World Cup.

Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.

At least one email has been so laughably bad, I’ve sent it on to friends and colleagues so they can marvel that, yes, some agencies are still much worse than had previously been imagined.

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming, but at least one agency has come close to me breaking this general self-imposed rule. Not that they’d know – judging from their emails I’d be shocked if they’ve even ever bothered to read anything I write.

Here’s a few selected highlights:

• An email starting with the words: “Hi, we’ve created some virals for your blog.” No, no you haven’t.
• An fairly obvious copy and paste email email urging me to cheer on England three days after they were knocked out.
• A general assumption that I was a fanatical England fan. I support Wales. This is fairly obvious.
• An email asking me to send a copy of my publication to agency x if I ran a piece on the product they were hawking.
• The PR who sent a pitch during the opening game. We had better things to do at that stage.
• Several emails that had nothing to do with the World Cup, other than a hastily added sentence to include a reference. You’re fooling no-one here.
• All bar two emails started with ‘Hi’. Not ‘Hi Gary,’ or any attempt to make it personal. Just ‘Hi’.
• One insinuating I would be so desperate for content during a two day break of football that their pitch was the only way I could keep my readers hooked.
• Hardly any emails made any reference to the fact I write for half a dozen places at the best of times. It was always ‘for your blog’. Do they mean this place and its five readers?

There have been two exceptions to this general trend – two well-crafted, engaging pitches where the PR had clearly read the type of things I write about, read my profile and made a general effort.

They were the only two I replied to – and if they’re reading, you know who you are, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to write about the information in your pitch. It was simply a case of lack of time. But I really did appreciate your emails and the personal touches. If I was using good examples of how to pitch to bloggers, these would be among them.

Speaking to other bloggers, the trend seemed to be depressingly similar. They too had received endless pitches from PRs labouring under the illusion that we were so excited about the World Cup, we’d write about any old tat that mentioned it.

They were half right. We’ve all been very excited about the World Cup.

I’d even go as far as to say that once the World Cup kicked off, unless the pitch was something very pertinent to the general narrative of the tournament, then football bloggers should have been the last people to pitch to.

The reason: we’ve all got more than enough to write about. With three games a day for the first two weeks, and then a couple more a day for a week after that, it’s really not as if any football blog is struggling for content during the World Cup. And as most bloggers generally have day jobs, unless it’s a pretty spectacular, the pitch is likely to be deleted, assuming it even gets read.

The really smart PRs – and there have been a few – would have got their campaigns and pitches in at least a couple of weeks in advance of the tournament. That stage is a bit of a deadzone, with a lack of any content or decent talking points.

And – on a small tangent – twofootedtackle’s Chris expressed amazement that I’d received so many general PR pitches. I’m such an infrequent writer, and aren’t fixed to any specific publication that I’m not an overly easy writer to target. Quite often the editors of the places I write for receive the same release, which is a bit of a waste of an email. There’s really not a great deal of point sending me a general release at the moment.

I’d like to stress that I’m definitely not PR-unfriendly – quite the contrary, if it’s a well-written, personalised and targeted pitch then I’ll make an effort to write about it, although this isn’t always possible. I’ve written some very interesting and enjoyable pieces off the back of good pitches.

But as somebody who has done plenty of blogger outreach, and still does the occasional bit in this area, I’m far less tolerant of badly done pitches, especially because I know that this stuff really isn’t rocket science and really isn’t hard to do well.

And at the end of the day, I can just hit the delete button. The guys at the brand who’ve paid for blogger outreach – and have no doubt been told that x number of blogs have been hit – are throwing thousands of pounds down the drain for incredibly bad PR and probably don’t even realise it.

UPDATE:

And the day this is published, the PR company I’ve already requested remove me from their mailing list, sends me another email inviting me to something I don’t want to go to. In Manchester. Next weekend. It’s fairly obvious, that I don’t live in Manchester. Or Birmingham, where the same thing I don’t want to go to is happening, but the weekend later. I have plans both those weekends. Exactly how many bloggers do they expect to get to this event? Or are they just box ticking?

My bad. I misread the email. They’re not inviting me to go to the events. Just write an enthusiastic blog post about them. Which is even less appealing.

Also, Chris O, as a final post on the excellent – and soon to be departed – Some People Are On The Pitch blog has done a list of every company that’s pitched them to write about brands that, if you ever read SPAOTP, you’d know they’d have little or no interest in writing about.

written by Gary \\ tags: football bloggers, pitching football bloggers, pitching to bloggers, PR, PR and bloggers, World Cup, World Cup PR

Anybody not from Britain looking at the Twitter trending topics today would have probably been baffled to see Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy near the top. Thanks to the British sense of humour, the catchphrase from 70s sitcom Are You Being Served was all over the microblogging site in tribute to the death of comic actress Mollie Sugden [1]. Jonathan Ross was one of those responsible for getting the topic to the top of Twitter charts.

Sure enough, other countries were a bit puzzled by the trend, so much so that both Techcrunch and Mashable wrote stories complaining that Twitter was getting infected with spam again [2]. They were soon put right in the comments.

I’m not an overly big fan of the show, but this little Twitter trend and the reaction does appeal to my sense of humour. You’d like to think that Mollie Sugden would have found it funny as well. It’s a fitting tribute.

But among all this there is a serious point to be made, with regard to the old blogs v journalism arguments. Especially in light of TMZ’s Michael Jackson scoop, there seems to be a general reluctance to trust blogs ahead of traditional media, even if the blogs have a long and trusted record. Sadly, this little snippet gives the journalist a nice easy own goal.

As many comments in both articles have said, a very quick bit of research would have shown that this was a genuine trending topic and not a story, bar one of those ‘aren’t Twitter users funny’ filler pieces. As it was, both writers immediately jumped to the conclusion that they had a Twitter spam story on their hands and published, seemingly without any checks or approach for comment. Plenty of ammunition for the blogging naysayers.

[But then again some newspaper journalism can't claim to be a great deal better].

On the other hand, there is a lot to be said here for the fact that both writers visibly corrected their copy very quickly after being called to account, and were prepared to brave the comments. And that’s something you cannot imagine the many newspapers doing, period. Plus, it did bring up the small but interesting question of how Twitter blocks certain phrases from trending.

It doesn’t excuse the rather sloppy research (and desire to pull out a quick post) in the first place [3]. But it does show how news can be more democratic and accountable, and quickly corrected, and that’s got to be a good thing.

[1] For anybody not familiar with the sitcom, it was a running joke where Mrs Slocombe, a very prim and proper lady, would constantly refer to her pet cat in a variety of ways laced with innuendo.

[2] Although it’s easy to forget that pussy has much stronger connotations in the US than it does here.

[3] And I’m writing this as both a fan and a regular reader of both blogs. I think they’re better than a lot of traditional news sources. But when they do mess up, it’s a lot more public.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Mashable, Mrs Slocombe's Pussy, Techcrunch, trending topics, Twitter

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqX-tkDXEk]

For a bunch of aging comedians, the Monty Python crew have always been a bit ahead of many of their younger contemporaries when it comes to the internet. Now they’ve gone where many other TV shows would fear to go – uploading their content for free onto YouTube.

As the Guardian reports, they’ve used the site’s Video ID system to identify their material that’s been uploaded (without their permission), replacing it with better quality footage on their own YouTube channel and attaching adverts to the clips urging watchers to buy their DVDs. That immediately appears to have paid off:

“And there is method in the Pythonesque madness of giving away valuable content for free – Monty Python’s DVD sales are up more than 1,000% following the launch of their YouTube channel, and that’s on Amazon alone. Fans must have been listening to the Python message: “We want you to click on links and buy our movies and TV shows. Only this will soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years …”"

As a fan, it’s a great idea – high quality clips for free, while there’s no better way to get you in the frame of mind to buy some classic Python. The quality of the clips is definitely a key hook – why trawl through poor-quality stuff when you’ve got the official stuff in all its glory?

Would this approach work for other shows? Well, the Python team are in a pretty privileged position as they’ve got an established brand and a very large fanbase – not to mention (I’d imagine) hundreds of people searching for clips on YouTube every day.

Whether it’d work for a smaller show trying to make a name for itself or a lengthy drama is an interesting one – but it certainly couldn’t hurt to try.

YouTube is a massive player in online video, so it makes sense to try and utilise it – and if the content’s officially sanctioned, it does give the show’s owner some degree of control. And, as the Python team have already shown, it can have a positive effect on sales.

It’s all part of the more social experience that viewers come to expect online today, and shows that YouTube is hear to stay and should be considered in any promotional strategy. Quite how you then drive traffic from there to your own website, and then ensure you make money from it, is another question entirely. But if you’re not engaging in some way with these sites, there’s always a risk of becoming a dead parrot.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Monty Python, TV clips, video, YouTube

Newspapers, as I’ve been banging on for as long as I can remember, really need to start embracing and testing out new social media applications, especially Twitter. They’re not difficult to set up, can provide an immediacy their website can’t always provide, and give a great opportunity to interact with their audience and liveblog events.

However, there’s experimentation and then there’s just completely not getting the right stories to use Twitter for. I would dearly love to know what was going through the head of the reporter or editor on the Rocky Mountain News’ head who decided it was a good idea to Live Tweet the funeral of a 3-year-old boy killed at an ice-cream store. Have a read of the reporter’s feed from the funeral – it feels like a Chris Morris satire of social media, or an update of a football game.

It’s great that journalists are embracing sites like Twitter and seeing their potential. But it probably doesn’t hurt to also engage your brain when thinking about the best place to test them out are. Local events or breaking news are probably a good bet. Dead children are usually best avoided for this kind of thing.

If you want a good guide on testing out sites like Twitter, Qik, and Flip, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has an excellent piece explaining, quite simply, the sites and how he found using them. Any journalist who’s thinking of trying out the sites should have a read.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: fail, journalism, liveblogging, QIk, Rocky Mountain News, social media, Twitter

Twitter sure doesn’t make it easy for people to give it the love they want to give. The downtime and the stressing out and the frequent appearances of the Fail Whale would have done in a lesser company by now, but we stick by it because Twitter is so damn useful.

But judging by the reaction to this morning’s problems that have seen people’s following and follower lists decimated or, in some cases, completely deleted, users are rapidly losing patience. Unless these kind of things are sorted, and quickly, then a Twitter-mass migration might be a way away.

That it hasn’t probably says as much about Twitter’s competitors as it does the site itself. I’ve hardly touched by Plurk account because, while it’s a bit of fun, its just not as instantly useful as Twitter. I can’t really comment on Friend Feed as I’ve not joined, although its been on my to do list for a while. Early adopters do seem to like it though.

If something similar had happened with Facebook, say, it would have been major news and covered by all the mainstream media and done some serious harm to the brand, especially when you’ve got a twitchy set of users showing signs of being ready to perhaps migrate elsewhere.

Twitter’s saving grace may well be it still relatively low profile outside the early adopter and blogging crowd. And the fact it’s so damn useful. But too many more snafus won’t do anything to encourage new users, which is what Twitter needs if it’s to grow as a company. Moreover, it can only be a matter of time before somebody builds a better, more stable Twitter-clone than Twitter.

I still love Twitter. It’s clean, simple and easy to use. It’s been so damn useful for breaking news, making contacts, sharing information and publicity purposes that I now can’t live without it. But many more of these kind of problems and I suspect I won’t be the only one looking elsewhere, assuming there is an alternative.,

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: FriendFeed, Plurk, technical problems, Twitter, Twitter down