I'm game for a guest post. Hit me up whenever. I can shoot some ideas your way too.

I don't think that's spamming at all. You're selecting a specific message that you want to reach everybody who follows you. That sounds like good communication to me.

Next time I think about writing a post about Twitter, I think I'll just hit you up for a guest post. Your essay comment is thoughtful, welcome, and needed.

Thanks!

We'll use our good pal Chris Brogan as an example. Was following him, then switched to the show all @s option, then unfollowed him as his individual communications were overtaking my twitter stream (which did teach me a lot about the power of using twitter to communicate but also caused me to miss tweets from everyone else). Then I finally switched off the show all @'s option and refollowed Chris. At this point, bet he thinks I'm just a follow/unfollow spammer from all that!

If the policy change was truly to lower their server load, then I'm all for it. Otherwise, they should have left users with the choice, even though many would agree with your sentiments that it caused too much noise.

As for crashtagging, didn't realize there was a name for it but I utilize it very, very rarely for @'s that I think would be appreciated by a larger audience. Looking through my past 150 tweets, I used it twice. One was a tweet about how the Linksys WRT54GL router + DD-WRT firmware makes for the best sub-$100 router ever (figure lots of people would be interested in having a $600 quality router for $60). The other time was to thank people for reviewing me on scribnia.com to show that I do appreciate feedback and to help build buzz for the scribnia peeps, who've got a great site on their hands. Considering many of my followers are also bloggers, it's a potentially valuable tweet for them.

Is that spamming? Considering how rarely I actually “crashtag”, I'd say no but I'll leave it up to everyone else to decide.

One final note before I conclude my essay comment, if two people are engaged in a conversation at a party, I'm not going to go butt in and say “hey looks like yall are having fun, mind if I attach myself” (unless I already know them). If a group of people are, then yeah by all means. The new twitter policy matches that and makes sense for the vast majority of people out there.

We're not supposed to talk about how impossible it is to interact in a value-added way with thousands of people at the same time! =P

An oily glass wall. Not even a nice dry concrete one. What a mess.

It just takes a little while for people to understand the reasoning behind things, although if twitter had wrote this post it might have made everyone's moaning a more moderate…burp?

Regarding spammers etc. Im educating clients as much as possible on how to benefit from twitter and also how to deal with spammers via these posts.

http://www.justinparks.com/twitter-follower-cou...

and to deal with spammers:
http://www.justinparks.com/dealing-twitter-auto...

That's pretty vicious. I hope no spammers run into you!

seriously, what are these people thinking?

total disregard for the cool and powerful online tool they're using.

aaarrrggghhh! am i allowed to scream?