Sitetweet: Your behaviors on sites may be shown on Twitter

in connect, consume, product reviews, site reviews, social media, twitter by faryl on March 4th, 2009No Comments

After seeing a tweet about sitetweet.net, I headed over to the site to see what it was all about:

sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site. Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.

Some interesting uses:

receive details on goal completions;

register specific searches;

receive notifications from vistors from specific sources.

My initial thoughts

Without seeing sitetweet in action, my immediate reaction was: Depending on implementation, this seems like a potential invasion of visitors’ privacy – what if a visitor doesn’t want you tweeting about their activities on your site?

Giving it a second thought, one would have to provide some sort of login or other information at a site for the tool to be able to send an identifying tweet. Assuming the visitor had the opportunity to decline the tweet, any privacy issues would be avoided. Additionally, if the tweet referred to the action, not the user (e.g., “Someone just commented on a post” or “We just received a $10 donation!”), visitor privacy becomes less of a concern.

Testing it out

Since sitetweet just released a WordPress plugin, I figured I’d give it a look-see and registered for the site. A downside to the registration process is the requirement to provide your twitter login/password – a prevalent and somewhat necessary evil for third party twitter apps, given the constraints of Twitter’s API.

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that the registration process included the options to post an intro tweet via my Twitter account and follow sitetweet selected as the the default:

reminder: always read what you're agreeing to!

I figured it out fairly quickly when “I” tweeted the following:

faryl: Now using sitetweet – http://sitetweet.net/twitter ! My users’ behaviors on my site will now be shown on my twitter account.

Am I tweeting your “behaviors” here?

In a word: no.

Although I can see sitetweet’s value for some website owners, I couldn’t think of a compelling reason that this would be a “must have” for the Fearless Blogger. Part of my hesitance is that yesterday’s site outtage has me a bit gun-shy about installing gratuitous plugins.

To be candid, I was also turned off by the intro tweet as well. Granted, I had the option of opting out – overlooking it was my mistake. Rarely do I find sites that share my belief that any non-required options (e.g., mailing list registration, newsletter sign-up) should be left unchecked as the default.

The decision factor

It’s not so much that the tweet was sent – it was what it said. Before I’d had an opportunity to evaluate the plugin, readers received a message that their behaviors on my site will tracked and shared. Even if I were to delete the tweet, that information remains online and will be included in search results.

I value my readers’ privacy and comfort levels. Tantamount to that is earning and maintaining your trust.

Let me be clear – I’m not suggesting that using sitetweet does infringe on visitor privacy. Nor should this be considered a negative review. Sitetweet is an innovative service and I could see where certain sites could find some fun ways to implement it. I was probably less inclined to explore potential uses here after being a bit soured by the tweet. On first glance, it just didn’t jump out at me as something that would enhance or add value to reader’s experience here.

And at the end of the day, it’s not the bells and whistles that convince me to add a feature to my site: it’s you.

Your turn

What are some creative uses you can think of for sitetweet’s service?
Do you have concerns about visiting sites that might use similar services to gather & share information about you?

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