A number of sites are bashing ESPN for their new policty on Twitter but it really is the only logical thing to do. ESPN sent out new guidelines that said their talents' sports related tweets would have to be OK'd by an immediate supervisor and that people needed to remember that they were always representing ESPN so they shouldn't tweet something they wouldn't say on the air. For example, Mark Schlereth's twitter argument with Chad Ochocinco does nothing to help Schlereth's reputation as an expert.

Of course, the person who made the most out of this was Ric Bucher but he's also probably the reason that the rule came down. For months now, Bucher has been self-publishing rumors and opinion without even a nod to ESPN. He was basically giving away info for free and he himself had threatened to stop tweeting because other sites were picking up his tweets and passing them off as their own rumors.

For a quick comparison on how someone working in the business should tweet, look at Adrian Wojnarowski from Yahoo! Sports. First off, his name is YahooSportsNBA or something like that. His profile has a link to Yahoo! sports. Every time he posts a big rumor, he follows it up later with a link to the full story at Yahoo!

Bucher has a nice little Ric Bucher logo and, at a quick glance, not a single mention of ESPN on his page. Going back a month of tweets (almost all sports related), he didn't post a single link to ESPN. I'm sorry but if someone working for ANY website, big or small, was doing this, the same thing would have happened. Hell, even Ashton Kutcher recently went on Conan and whined about Twitter not showing him any love (or money) for everything he's done on the site.

And this is one of the main reasons that I think Twitter is a bit of a fad. People can't really make money off of it, except as something that helps promote their articles. It's basically just a low rent RSS feed. 

If I knew anything about programming, I'd try to put together a Home Page program that would put together selected RSS feeds so it looked a bit like The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast.

But now I'm rambling. The basic point is that ESPN is protecting their investment and making sure that their employees aren't essentially leaking the information that they should be posting on the actual ESPN site.