Compass Designs .net

I have been using Twitter a while now, and all the usual comments that I have heard I seem to agree with. It can be useful, but can also be a considerable distraction.

Today there was an interesting exchange which illuminates another issue of Twitter. Communicating via email is easy enough to misconstrue, but at only 140 characters its even easier for things to be posted, picked up, and before you know it you have the old game of something getting passed along RT's and more and more distorted. This doesn't even begin to address the problems of Reputation Management.

Some background might help.

corePHP recently released an integration for Wordpress and Joomla. Its a meaningful amount of code, and its released under the GPL, available though subscription (according to Corephp themselves). An identical business model as, say, Jxtended. corePHP are also frequent Tweeters. Ok by me, if you don't like how much they post, don't follow them.

Earlier today, corephp put our a tweet that started a bit of a storm, with even prominent Joomla advocates getting involved.

The initial Tweet was:

"As many of you know the Joomla! extension directory is going away. Here is a new resources for the same thing - http://www.cmsextensions.org"

It can be easy to fire off tweets, what it seems Corephp actually meant was:

"non-GPL commercial and Joomla! 1.0 products are going away in the extension directory."

Which he corrected a few hours later when people asked about it.

We then see @AmyStephen getting fired up, even calling @corephp a liar to her 900 some followers, and then it getting RT by me_arno.

Turns out @corephp also forgot to include "non-GPL" as well.

Now, I might think that this was just a bit of misunderstanding except among @AmyStephen's replies was a passing shot at @corephp new Wordpress extension for Joomla:

"Shocking how @corephp takes WP - and Joomla! - free work from 2 communities - put them together - sell it - and treat the community this way"

Not sure what the issue is here. They have a significant extension that's GPL and available under subscription, nothing to see here... move along. Last month she also reported @corephp for spam. Seems to me that @AmyStephen has a track record of "misunderstanding"....

Which brings me to the point here. Its so easy and so fast for things to travel on Twitter, and little fact checking is done, so lots of inaccurate information can spread, either by accident, or intentionally by people wanting to cause reputational damage.

How is your business handling Twitter as a new communication vehicle about your company?

I hope at the very least you have a search set up for your own name!!

Update

If you want to see an example of professional behaviour and more thoughtful tweeting (actually on the same topic), look no further than @AndrewEddie

(For the record, the JED is removing non-GPL extensions in July 2009. I don't want to debate that decision here and all comments regarding it will be removed)