Twitter is undoubtedly the hot platform right now. Recently, I have been playing around with Twitter by creating an automated price alerts feed (BetfairAlerts) from our public API. BetfairAlerts monitors the Betfair market prices and tweets when the price changes by a preconfigured amount.
Because Betfair prices relate to real world and real time observations they are very well suited to being part of the Twitter stream. For example, when a goal is scored the BBC might tweet "Ronaldo scores, Man United 1 - Liverpool 0", then BetfairAlerts tweets "Punters think the chances of Man United winning are increasing: ManU 1.24 to win". These tweets could be linked together via a Twitter meme or rely on search or following to be found by punters. Punters can follow the alerts through the standard Tweet apps (e.g. Tweetdeck) online or on their mobile phones.
BetfairAlerts had some success in gathering a following. Although it is obvious that the vast majority of followers are spam machines. From my experience with Twitter it seems that +90% of accounts and the tweets they produce are absolute garbage. However, you have to remember that Twitter is a 2 step process - publish and subscribe. Providing application developers continue to find interesting ways to filter and leverage the data then the amount of spam is irrelevant. I think Twitter as a platform has a long way to go.
So what are the risks? If you are too agressive at raising the profile of your account you may find that Twitter switch it off. If you visit BetfairAlerts on Twitter right now, you will see the standard Twitter suspended message. How did this happen? Well let's just say that there are no shortcuts to building a following. Beware automated applications that purport to rapidly increase your following. Twitter are wise to these apps and you may find yourself in Twitter jail for at least 30 days. Hopefully, we can get this resolved soon and start our tweeting experiment again.
Also, if you are a cricket fan check out our Ashes ticket competition on Twitter.
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