Spam is un-asked-for communication

If they ask for a feed, fine, if they don't then you are spamming, blatantly and aggressively.

Would this be good for Mahalo?
well, does Mahalo send spam?
do you want to?
is that going to make this a 5/5 site?

Quality over quantity is the way to go - brain-farting business ideas at the drop of a hat when new options present themselves, isn't running a long term option, its traffic hogging and spamming. But then again, its how the net works...

How to make it not like spam?
Ask! Don't assume

If you use tools like this make the users feel like they have some control, otherwise its spam spam spam spam spam

EDIT - the anonymous user and twitter are good for only two things, money and traffic, and gaming!
Quality went out the window!
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I'm going to have to agree with kty on this one.

On Twitter, if I get random replies that respond to my keywords I've tweeted, I block them. I don't follow them back, I barely even read their message to me. And I never click on links they send to me, because Twitter has become a breeding ground for phishing scams. No thanks.

I think using this tool would actually tarnish the good reputation of Mahalo.
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At first glance this screamed SPAM! But now that I looked at it closer, I am starting to like it.

Twitterhawk's FAQ page indicates that this is a highly throttled service. They seem keenly aware of the potential for abuse, so they limit the number of tweets that can be sent out enough to make it all but useless to spammers. In fact, I think the only way you could reach mass numbers of people through this would be through re-tweets, and that would depend on how much the initial tweet is appreciated, wouldn't it? That's a good thing. Plus, it avoids tweeting the same person multiple times, which would really make it seem like spam.

A short CNet article from earlier this year explained that Twitterhawk is at least somewhat intelligent. It doesn't scan for just a keyword, it can interpret context and location. This makes me a little more comfortable with it as well.

To make good use of this in a non-spammy manner it should be used as a tool that simply does searches for you... Set it to search twitter for mention of a very current and interesting topic (the CODMW2 example was perfect) where Mahalo has some excellent content. The tweet sent should have a personal feel just as if you are tweeting a few people individually about it. Due to the throttling Twitterhawk has in place, this is essentially what is happening anyway. It is just taking some time-consuming, manual steps out of the way.

In the end, my gut feeling on this can be summed up as "Twitterhawk doesn't spam people. PEOPLE spam people!"
Source(s):
http://www.twitterhawk.com/faq
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10158914-2.html

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I composed an idea a few months ago mentioning that this type of auto responder would be a good re purpose of the current Mahalo Twitter Import tool.

I coded a good portion of this using the Twitter API but abandoned it when Mahalo stopped importing Twitter questions.

Here's what I thought would be useful:

Allow a Page Manager to input a twitter Search term.
For example: "anyone know" OR "how can I" SEO

Page Manager inputs tweet and short url to their page.
For example: Let me know if this How To guide helps you out How To SEO Your Website

Page Manager inputs the frequency of tweets.

Tweets are not sent if there are too many search results returned.
For example if I searched for SEO and had the system reply to all of those tweets, this would not be effective at all.

Specifically to your questions:

1. How might the Mahalo community use a tool like this to introduce people to our content?

It could be used, but Twitterhawk is a little expensive for the majority of pages. Technically, Twitterhawk is on the easy to moderate side of development difficulty so developing it in house could remove these marketing costs.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2501/4105843911_17e62e9e81_o.jpg

2. How would you avoid it feeling like spam?

By refining the search terms. Twitter uses Boolean searching. And's, Or's, Quotes, etc can all refine a search to find people who are asking questions.

Also, I like the way that Twitterhawk allows you to manually send out reply tweets. You can read each tweet and only reply to ones that are valid.

All-in-all, I think this is a very good idea... I'm glad someone caught the idea and made it.
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At least one intention of Twitterhawk was to target based on location and presumably context. It seemed that the tweets were intended to be actively managed by a human. I think it would be hard to determine context and location with algorithms.

What might be useful is for Mahalo to scan the questions (Mahalo Answers, Twitter or other sites) and notify the page manager (of a Mahalo how-to or regular page) that someone asked a question related to their page. The page manager then decides to respond with a response. This seems more in line with "human-powered search". Unless you are glued to Mahalo Answers or twitter feeds most of us aren't going to catch relevant questions that could use our answers. This is where the algorithm would help.

Also trying to find a previous question/answer in Mahalo Answers is a bit difficult so the algorithm could say "similar question answered in past".

All in all "Tweeting" the page manager is my vote when something interesting comes through the "wire" whether it be a Tweet or a Mahalo Question.
Source(s):
twitterhawk.com

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