For the past 6 days, Moonfruit have been running a promotion giving away Macbook Pro’s: http://www.moonfruit.com/macbook-pro.html. Entering the competition was really easy – on a tweet, just put “#moonfruit” somewhere, and that’s a single entry made!
For the first few days, it was great – and, probably exceeded what Moonfruit would expect in terms of coverage – it was the top trending topic for 3 days (I think) and lots of technology blogs and news sites picked up on it – the cost of ten Macbook Pro’s certainly looked cheap compared to the coverage Moonfruit was getting because of it!
However, it looks like Twitter have made the decision to stop #moonfruit from being a trending topic. It was top for quite a few days before it just disappeared, with no explaination – and, words which weren’t being tweeted as much were trending.
Moonfruit themselves have created a blog post about it, and decided to end the competition early by giving away 4 Macbook Pro’s tomorrow, instead of over the next 10 days.
I’m quite disappointed actually – sure, the whole #moonfruit thing was a marketing exercise for Moonfruit, but still, it was an interesting tag and people were being really creative. I normally don’t take part in these sort of things, but this one I did (and my followers will vouch for the sheer amount of tweets I put out there!) .. and lots of other people did too. Infact, in the end, Moonfruit decided to give away extra prizes to the most creative of tweets, as some people put a lot of effort into getting #moonfruit out there.
I’m not sure why Twitter decided to stop it from trending – I guess the whole “spam” argument got too much – and, in fairness, where will it end? If it does carry on, and we have 100 other companies trying to do the #moonfruit thing, then Twitter may become a bit useless and just a spammers paradise. It’s the sort of thing which works great only once.
So, have Twitter done the right thing? Should they have allowed things like this? What should they block? Should they block more? Let me know your thoughts.
Read the Moonfruit blog post here: http://www.moonfruitlounge.com/post/2009/07/06/Twitter-censors-Moonfruit-What-does-it-mean-for-the-future-of-Twitocracy