What Should User Expectations Be When An Internet Service Is Free?

What Should User Expectations Be When An Internet Service Is Free?

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or GTalk probably know by now that Friday afternoon I lost all of my Twitter followers and everyone I was following. For those of you who didn’t know, let me fill you in:

Mid afternoon on Friday I noticed that I had gone tweetless for quite some time. Upon further investigation I discovered that my follower and following number were both set at 0; a scary realization for someone who had nearly 650 followers and was following over 800 tweeple. After navigating through the terrible, terrible, support system used by Twitter I finally figured out how to report my concern via commenting on the “known issue”. After my post and a number of other user posts Twitter admitted there was a problem and at 3:00 pm PST and advised users that they had a fix and it would be resolved today.

It is now 8:32pm PST and my account, and from what I can tell in the Twitter support thread, a number of other accounts are still without any followers and are unable to follow anyone. That’s over 72 hours without a resolve, which has left me crippled in terms of spreading blog posts, information, and interacting with fellow twitter users.

Earlier this morning I had a brief discussion with some of my fellow SEO Dojo members about the issue, and one member in particular, Justin Parks, made an interesting comment; “I don’t think anyone should complain, free is free after all.”. It got me thinking; in one hand he was right. I pay absolutely nothing to help keep Twitter afloat, what right do I have to complain that it has been nearly 72 hours and I’ve been without service. On the other hand, Twitter provides a service to the public. Free or not I feel it is in some way their obligation to try and support their customer base as much as possible; if not for the users alone, at least out of good business sense.

Since my post in the thread Friday afternoon at least 30 other twitter users have complained of the same problem I am experiencing, and no further updates regarding an ETA or status of the issue have been made by Twitter their post on Friday.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think free services like Twitter have an obligation to support their customers better than they are currently, or is Justin correct in the sense that if we aren’t paying for it we should just deal? Let me know what you think in the poll below. I may be doing a follow up post once service is restored and I’ll use the data collected.

6 thoughts on “What Should User Expectations Be When An Internet Service Is Free?

  1. I think Justin has a point with “free is free”. However, if Twitter wants to make money and stay afloat, they need their users to stay so their revenue will stay (ads not being seen won’t be purchased anymore).

    That being said, it sounds like if Twitter would simply create a more user-friendly support system, it would consume less of their resources going back and forth with people, and would fit better into that “free” model.

  2. I think Twitter has an obligation to support it’s customers just as any other business. As Twitter users we have invested time and effort into our networks and although it’s a free service our participation is a benefit to Twitter as well. I assume Twitter is eventually, planning on making money. At that point all Twitter users will be helping them make that money through our participation.

    I guess my point is that both Twitter and its users are benefiting so not only does Twitter owe its users good customer support, they better deliver it or they might lose the people that make it successful.

  3. I can fully understand how frustrating it is when services go bad. Imagine if Gmail was to screw up – the information I’d lose would be totally priceless – its a free service which really means you have nothing to claim when things go wrong.

  4. I think that while these services are free, they are free because of the revenue we and others generate by being on them. So in essence they are making money because of you, therefore they should support their revenue stream.

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