< /HATE >

A few days ago, Jesse Stay of SocialToo, announced that auto-follow and daily e-mail manifests of follows and un-follows of Twitter would be disabled due to some maintenance. Fairly normal right?

He immediately received 2 comments from some rather insensitive and hateful SocialToo users!

A little background might help…

First, those of you that frequent Twitter know of SocialToo, a service that helps you discreetly manage your followers. It also provides some help with Facebook and identi.ca, as well as allowing you to launch ad hoc social surveys. The service is ingenious in it’s niche, quite frankly, because:

1. The services themselves are so bad at helping you manage your subscribers within the application, and
2. It helps you engage your community with ad hoc surveys.

Let me tell you, this is a great service for avid Twitter users, I can assure you of that. And what’s even better is that it is advertisement driven so I don’t have to pay a single cent to use!

Seriously?

When I happened across a tweet from Jesse, I popped on over to the SocialToo blog and lo and behold saw something that just made my jaw drop and blood begin to rise to a slow simmer.

One commenter wrote:

…You just look incompetant. I have found a better service.

… and what’s even better is she couldn’t spell incompetent!

Another commenter wrote:

Don’t expect people to GUESS [in all caps] they should maybe visit your blog to know that something is wrong… I have a dial-up connection (like 50% of people, mind you, because living in the country has that kind of price) so forget RSS for us. Hope next time you will do a better job of managing this kind of situation. Have a great day.

Have a great day? Seriously? What are blogs for if not transferring information? I guess I’m odd for visiting a company’s forum and/or blog first for scoop on what’s happening.

So where did all the love go? No, better yet what in the world gives people the right to such a feeling of entitlement?

I do agree that having a stable service is desired, and is important to maintaining happy and frequent customers. But can’t you give a guy a break every once in a while?

When contacted for comment, Jesse, taking it in stride, simply had this to say,

I’m amazed at the emotions I see when [SocialToo daily e-mail updates] go down.

The take away:

My take away is that these folks need to get a grip and check back in to reality! I mean c’mon folks – these folks have proven they don’t want to pay for anything that they use. Hmmm, in some circles that might be called squatting, or even theft.

Content producers and service providers in this new Web 2.0 world live and love to share information and extend the conversation. They toil long hours and often see very little come back to them except a few comments or maybe some random checks from advertisers. Very, very few of us make out like bandits off such services – and in fact – many of us use the small payments we receive just to keep the lights on.

So ask yourself, “Do you want to have access to these services?” If the answer is no, then go away – quietly into this good night. But if the answer is yes, then shut up and give these good people a break every once in awhile.

mage courtesy of: Marlith

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To connect with Ken, you may visit him at DandyID.