The league fined Amare Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler for tweeting during a game this weekend. The thing is, though… they didn't.
Laptop was open, and so was my Twitter client of choice, when my feed
was updated with a tweet from @Amareisreal. This made me LOL, as the
kids say, because at that very moment, the account's owner — Amar'e Stoudemire
…Tyson Chandler
was also fined for a tweet that was sent out during a game, although
his case is a little different, because the message updated to his
account came from an automated service, instead of from an actual
person.
Chandler's account was updated by a site called twitterfeed,
which will automatically send out a tweet for you when a website's RSS
feed is updated. Chandler's website happened to be updated, twitterfeed
sent out the tweet announcing this fact from Chandler's account during
one of his games, and thus the league fined him for it.— was on the court not 20 feet in front of me, actively participating in his team's 12th win of the season.
Now I'd like to go off on the league for what it did. But someone else already did and nailed it… so all I can do is co-sign it.
yourself, they can be auto-fed or you can provide account access to
another person who can update for you. Which is exactly what happened…
Chandler's feed was updated automatically while he just happened to
be playing and an intern updated Stoudamire's feed while he was leading
the Suns past the Grizzlies. Anyone with a basic understanding of how
Twitter works would be able to deduce these instances quite easily.
Alas…
My advice to the NBA? Hire a fifteen-year-old social media whiz to
be your Twitter Czar. He'll be able to weed this stuff out easily so
all parties can avoid embarrassment.
Handing out fines for these incidents is like giving Rasheed Wallace a tech because someone in a Sheed mask yelled at a ref from the stands. It's dumb. If the NBA wants to redeem itself in front of its increasingly technology-savvy fan base… they'll rescind the fines and take a few minutes to learn the technology. Because this is just embarrassing.
(H/T: Jeff Clark)
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