Heard some people, like Tim O’Reilly, got their Twitter accounts suddenly suspended a few days ago while blogging Gov 2.0 conference, it had something to do with the hastag being used, appearently, too often.

In this, Twitter is becoming, or is, much like Google, who makes decicions about accounts, based on automatic algorithms, to surpress spam, but often error and suspend, derank, innocents, while they punish the “guilty spammers”

I understand the need to control spam, but question why more Customer Relationship Management is missing. I bet, if we had to pay to use Google to search and Twitter, to tweet, we’d have prompt customer service. Because Google and Twitter are free services, paid for by advertisers, we get no customer service, even though both Google and Twitter have become essential staples of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 (with Twitter Geolocation coming soon, as I mentioned at the Location Based Services meetup last night)

To make it more real and immediate, a friend had her Twitter account suspended recently, it was reactivated about a week later, no explaination, no ticketing system in place.

Here’s the story of what happened to Tim O’Reilly according to Techcrunch;
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” … In an ironic twist of fate, a number of people related to O’Reilly Media, as well as others guilty of using Twitter to express thoughts and commentary about and from the Gov 2.0 Summit, have found their accounts suspended this morning due to unspecified ’strange activity’.

That includes prolific (and real) Twitter users such as Tim O’Reilly himself, but also other accounts related to the publishing and event company, such as O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest (@brady), authors like Sean Power (@seanpower) and generic accounts including @w2e (for the Web 2.0 Expo) and @gov2events.”
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I think Twitter needs a realtime, say, a 4 to 8 hour response time, to issues, it’s about time to take some of that money they got from VC’s, and put in place ticketing systems like Get Satisfaction, to start immediately responding to issues as they come up.

I think customer relationship management ought not to be rationed out, based on paying for a product, or not; we are all, indirectly supporting Google and Twitter, anyway, via the ecosystem we’re part of, the ecosystem both serve.

About time for Google and Twitter to respond, in real time. All this “real time” Stuff both are obsessed with now, ought to be carried through to real time response, for a change. Is that asking for too much?