There’s more trouble in Twitter Land. It seems that they’ve been working on deleting spammers, or at least that’s my impression, and some users are getting caught in the crossfire.

Dave Delaney is still locked out, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Twitter said that his account had violated the TOS, but I  know from personal experience, Dave, and the others who were thrown out of the party early, haven’t done anything other than use the service the way they’re supposed to.

Dave is on day two of his mandatory time out even though others have been restored, an finally got a response from a Twitter rep directly, and then saw a post on GetSatisfaction from Jason Goldman, the official Twitter rep:

We’ve found that around seven accounts were accidentally suspended. They were mistakenly identified as spam; we are working to restore these accounts now.

While we have automated tools to identify spam, human review is still required before suspending accounts. Despite those safeguards, false positives can still occur and that’s what happened in this case.

I’m really sorry to those users who were affected by this mistake. We’re going to work a lot harder to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

All of these troubles are seriously making me wonder why I’m such a diehard twitter fan. I haven’t gotten into Identi.ca or Friendfeed or even Plurk, but I’m starting to think that I’ve really got to start moving my world.

Which are you using? Which do you think is better? And, what’s your user name over there?

(image source, screenshot from Dave Delaney)

My final guest post for the day, is another good one from Lisa Thomas-Tench.

So Plurk is all about creating karma. I’m not sure I get it.

I’m familiar with the term  but I’m not sure how it applies to this particular form of social media.

Let’s look at what increases your Plurk karma: microposting, replying, getting more ‘friends’ and ‘fans’, using icons in your posts, and inviting people to join.

I mean, to me, karma’s about doing good and being rewarded. Plurk’s about talking about yourself in, possibly, a very inane way. It’s about being popular and joining a clique. It’s about being able to click on smiley faces. It’s about having the time to obsess about your little karma number going up and down.

Essentially, Plurk is engaging you in a game rather than a distinct form of social connectivity. Unlike Twitter, where the content of your tweets determines your value in the community, Plurk values frequency and absurdity (what’s the difference between a ‘friend’ and a ‘fan’? No one I’ve asked on Plurk even seems to care).

How does this increase one’s ability to connect and share through media? I’m not sure yet if it does. In fact, I think that it bypasses the ‘social’ part of social media in a way that encourages anti-social behaviours, to a certain extent. People trying to drive up their karma numbers will pollute the timeline with valueless fluff and winking yellow faces, bringing in additional players to the game.

Twitter may be falling apart half the time, but I’ll take dharma over karma any day of the week.