Some of you may have noticed that your hourly observations are not always hourly. We have noticed that fact as well and have now concluded a thorough investigation into why this is happening. The culprit turns out to be none other than Twitter.com.
Twitter has for sometime now, blocked any tweet sent through API that is an exact repeat of a previous tweet, in an attempt to cut down on spam tweets or what is also known as “recurring tweets”. While all of our tweets are feeds that are original in nature, there are times where the readings that the National Weather service takes are identical to the readings they took just one hour before. Whenever this occurs, Twitter blocks the posting of the second observation report, and on very rare occasions, the third report, if in fact the observations have not changed.
While we here at Swas Inc. are not thrilled with this policy, we will make no attempts to circumvent the policy, nor will we ever complain directly to Twitter about the practice of blocking recurring tweets. We have two very good reasons to accept this policy:
1) It has a minimal effect on our followers as the observations are primarily served to them so that they receive a head’s up when conditions start to change. When readings taken by the NWS change this assures that any new tweet will not match the previous tweet, and therefor, it will not be blocked. Warning feeds or tweets always vary just enough to not get caught up in Twitter’s filter system, so they should remain unaffected by this policy. If in fact you still want updates on observations at any time, all you have to do is pull up the last observation tweet and click on the link. You will receive a fresh update whenever you follow this procedure.
2) We cannot stand spam ourselves, and fully support any effort Twitter makes to clean spam tweets from their system. We rarely use the DM feature to communicate, and do not ever ritually check DMs because the spam with DMs long ago reached insufferable levels. While we would love it if Twitter moved away from it’s carpet bombing mentality and made exceptions for such Tweets on an account by account basis, as long as our followers get updates when conditions start to change, our purpose here is well served by Twitter.
Do we agree with many other developers that resourceful spammers will use spinnable text or other methods to circumvent the block from Twitter? Yes, we most certainly do, but again, our job is to notify you when weather conditions change, and as long as we are allowed to perform that task, will somewhat happily overlook Twitter’s atypical sledgehammer approach to solving problems.
Will this affect our revenue picture? Absolutely. Let me say that again, ABSOLUTELY! However if we were solely interested in making a profit, we have put in an application with AIG for an executive position, or applied for work with any American health insurance provider as a claims adjuster. Instead we decided to serve up weather warnings on Twitter and as Forrest Gump frequently said, “that’s all I have to say about that.”