Twitter, Common Decency and the Corinthian Spirit

When the penalty kick rule was first introduced to English football in the late 1880s, it was greeted with horror by the Corinthians, the dominant team of the day. So engrained were principles of honour and decency in these ex-public schoolboys that they would not accept that an opponent might deliberately break the rules to gain an advantage. Their response was to refuse to score from a penalty on the grounds that it was ungentlemanly. Disadvantaged in this way, Corinthians began a decline as they struggled to compete against the more ruthless professional clubs that were emerging.

Now I'm wondering: does a similar fate lie in store for decent Twitter users like you and me?

As with so many things, the Corinthians set out with splendid ideals of decency and fair play - but sadly these values could not compete against hard cash. But is the same thing happening right now to Twitter? The question to ask is: "Are we reaching the end of the Golden Age of Twitter?"

Consider the principles currently embraced on Twitter:

·      Twitterers observe strict etiquette, publicly acknowledging RTs, for example.

·      Twitters reciprocate politely: if you follow them, they follow you back. It's just the way things are done.

·      Twitterers try not to be pushy. Promotional messages are (currently) outweighed by honest output, with most tweets ranging from the genuinely useful to the innocently mundane.

Now consider the threats:

·      The Twitter user base is currently doubling in size every month, and looks likely to go beyond 80 million by the end of the year

·      Twitter will give unscrupulous self-promoters free access to a huge and lucrative buying audience.

·      Twittger is beautifully basic, but fundamentally flawed, leaving those people open to abuse (on the @reply mechanism, for example - see the excellent Twittercism blog on the subject)

Things look like they are going to get tougher. Goodbye Mr Nice Guy. But am I right to be pessimistic about this? Is the Golden Age really coming to an end? Or is Twitter going to gently mature (aided by a multi-billion Google buyout perhaps?) and become an indispensable part of our lives to come? As an individual without a crystal ball, I don't have the answers. But together, we're the ones who are going to make or break it. So let's do the decent thing and remember the Corinthian spirit. And be nice.