Will Twitter Shut Down This Crazy Thunderclap Experiment Today? Probably!

Today’s the day that Thunderclap releases its first mass tweet into the wild. Late this morning, almost 2000 people are going to simultaneously Tweet a message from Matt Taibbi. If you don’t know of it, Thunderclap is like Kickstarter for mass tweets: if enough people sign on to a message, it goes live. (This particular tweet now counts its total reach at “3,793,447 people.”) I have mixed feelings about this project! It’s sort of genius? And yet I also dislike shilling and intrusiveness on Twitter. (And FYI, we “signed on” to this tweet as an experiment, because we wanted to see what would happen. In other disclaimer news, I only know about Thunderclap because we do a little business with the company behind it.) I would, however, like to see a project like this used for mayhem! I would like some mass tweeting about cats and stuff.

How is Twitter going to react to an experiment in mass tweeting? I’m suspecting “not well.” I took a quick cruise through Twitter’s “developer rules of the road” and their guidelines on automation and spam, and I don’t see them expressly forbid mass tweeting. But I don’t think they’ll care for it.