I love Twitter. The simpleness and openness of Twitter makes it useful for so many things. With it you can mass message a bunch of friends, do lazy research (pose a question), rant, promote yourself, or you can just be social. Then it should come as no surprise that the marketing folks had to spoil the party.

Twice in the last few weeks, I’ve received @ tweets from corporate entities in response to complaints I’ve made about a particular service or product.

The first time, I was whining about how Parallels stalls every time I open it up. Just a few minutes later, there was a reply from someone at VMWare urging me to check out Fusion, a competing product. Now, I’ve actually tried Fusion and had the same issue, so I just the problem up to virtualization in general. What was interesting is, I went back and forth with the person for awhile. They were trying to troubleshoot my problem. I’m not so much against that kind of personal attention though clearly VMWare was attempting to woo me.

The second incident was last weekend after an overnight Comcast internet outage at my house. A few minutes after posting a rant about not being able to get online, I received an @ reply from comcastcares. He says they’ll have to try and change my opinion. Having dealt with your incompetent CSRs and technicians, Bittorrent throttling, and monopolistic practices, it’s going to take a lot more than a little tweet to change my mind. In TWiT 143, Leo mentions that he’s also seen Frank from Comcast making the same kind of hollow comments to others. Comcast, let’s see some action instead of unfulfilled promises.