Thursday 14 July 2011

Twittascope: the bane of my twitter life. How to stop it

Gone are the days when you browse a magazine to read your horoscope. Well you can still do that but there are modern ways to get your horoscope delivered to you: you can have your horoscope tweeted to you. Sounds like a good idea, no? This is what Twittascope is for. How great would that be, to wake up every morning and to have your horoscope tweeted to you.








What Twittascope really does and how it is perceived by some…


Problem is that in reality it doesn't work like that. What the programme does and what you let the programme do, when you 'subscribe' to the service is to let it tweet on your behalf, and to aaaaaaall your lovely followers the horoscope attached to your personal star sign.

Now my tweets are annoying enough as it is. I tweet way too much for starters, my tweets seem to gravitate mainly about makeup, I participate in a lot of twitter competitions, I am known to have a few rants, my tweets are not always uplifting (any more depressing sometimes and you would want to throw yourself out of the window after reading my tweets) and the list goes on... Now why would I, to top it all off, make things worse and grace my lovely followers with the horoscope predictions about Pisces? How is that tweet relevant to people from other star signs? It isn't relevant and very annoying at best.


The most stupid thing about the design of Twittascope, is that, because the way programme works (Twittascope doesn't send you a direct message with your horoscope or not even a @mention) you don't even see the actual horoscope you actually subscribed to. People subscribed to the service are not actually not aware of the tweets they're posting.


This is the timeline of my friend subscribed to the service. I am not sure where she is at the moment. Have a look at a timeline. If you read it quickly, you could be  forgiven for thinking that she is a bot. 
She’s not.


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Now there are more important things that unwanted Twittascope spam I should be worrying about. I am usually OK with Twittascope, I follow so many people and it's hard to keep track of everything which is being tweeted. Every now and then though (and today seems to be one of these days) it's one of these pet peeves which resurface and when ask myself why people would want to subject their twitter followers to Spamoscope.


I am not the only one who is annoyed at Twittascope. And it's such a petty little thing in the grand scheme of twitter things that if you have Twittascope, your followers won't probably bother commenting on it. Today I would like to speak on behalf of all your followers who are also irritated with Twittascope spam and information about your star sign, but who are too polite to comment about it.



tweeters


Imagine the following scenario. Imagine Twittascope works the way it should work and sends you a direct message every day with your horoscope in there. You have TweetDeck installed and you get a sound notification everytime you get a DM or a @mention. Your TweetDeck beeps, you get all excited and you think ‘oOOo a new tweet, Yaaaaaay’ and then you find out that it was only Twittascope tweeting you. Great :S  


Now imagine you tweet something you feel a bit shy about, or something a bit sensitive.  You feel a bit nervous about how people are going to respond to your tweet. But you take the courage to tweet and do it. Your TweetDeck beeps, and you think ‘OMG, someone has replid’ and then, then THEN, you find out you got all excited for nothing because it was just Twittascope DMing you. Pretty bummed no? You’d be quite tempted to unsubscribe from the service from that unpleasant experience, wouldn’t you?


How to stop Twittascope tweeting on your behalf…


If you have Twittascope and feel concerned that you might cause erm.. discomfort to others and want to stop the subscription of the Twittascope, you can follow these easy steps:


1. Log on to http://www.twitter.com/
2. go to SETTINGS
3. go to APPLICATIONS. What this page will do, is to display all the applications you have authorised to work with your twitter account
4. Scroll down to TWITTASCOPE, and then press REVOKE ACCESS.


Thank you to lovely Kat aka @KittyFairy for the instructions.


So what do you do if you're really annoyed with Twittascope spam? If you mainly use TweetDeck, well you are in luck. You can add 'Twittascope' in your filters and be done with it. If you use web twitter, other than that speaking to the person twittascoping to the risk of ruining a twitter friendship for such a petty matter, there is nothing you can do, other than sucking it up, grin and bear it, and read the spam, day after day after day. Another option you now have is to say: 'OMG have you see this post about Twittascope? *hint* *hint* hope that they will get the hint ;)


Happy tweeting everyone. Peace ^_^


Hey, do you want to read my Twittascope for today? :P


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7 comments:

Hannah said...

Brilliant :o) xx

Sophie said...

haha, thanks for actually informing me I'm subscribed to it. one word= unsubscribed! sorry for filling your twitter feed with mumbo-jumbo everyday. :0) x

emalyce said...

Oooh that's good information! I used to be big into astrology a couple years ago, but now I'm not. I will know NOT sub to that one! haha

Unknown said...

Haha brilliant post! I didn't realise we could have filters in Tweetdeck *filters out Twittascope* xx

Phibster said...

Surprised you haven't written this post sooner!
Hoping the twitterscopers out there take action!

Anonymous said...

Here here! Hate it!
I love reading my daily horoscope and did have Twittascope once upon a time but no, I prefer me weekly mags and horoscopes.co.uk (I think that's it) I feel it's sort of sloppy to be posted on twitter. The fact so many people have it too. Why not just follow a twittascope twitter account that tweets them instead or something? xx

Vermaekansh said...

Thanks you so much...it is really a pain in the...

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