I'm not a greedy man, or an unreasonable one. (Nor, for that matter, am I insane. I'm NOT.) So when I sat down to place a monetary value on the content that's gone missing from my Twitter stream over the last week, an issue that Twitter has so far failed to acknowledge, I consistently rounded down. That's how I arrived at $62,000. I mean, I didn't just pull the figure out of a hat, although I did write some figures down and place them in a hat as a backup, along with some festively-wrapped holiday candy and some buttons. It's all here, in a post I wrote for Forbes.com: The roughly 4000 tweets that have vanished from my Twitter account have a value, and that value is sixty-two big ones, and that figure is more than fair to Twitter, despite the fact that I've given them every opportunity to make this thing right, which they have so far failed utterly to do.
So here's what I'm going to do: I'm crowdsourcing my outrage for Christmas. Do you have a Twitter account? If so, can you help me out? All you need to do is tweet the following:
@twitter @support You owe @billbarol $62,000. Pay up. http://t.co/e1jcou5
That's all there is to it. It's so simple. And the beautiful part is, it's not even remotely insane, it's NOT. Together we can make Twitter do what's right. And to show that my heart is in the right place. this is my pledge: Upon receipt of a certified check from Twitter in the amount of $62,000, I will in a relatively prompt manner donate $250 to a major charity that is legally registered in the US or her offshore waters. Because it's not about the money. And I am not insane. Merry Christmas! Viva la raza!
Cross-posted at Boing Boing.
Update, Dec. 25: Missing tweets restored. Thanks to Twitter, and to everybody who played along.