The London 2012 Olympics and Twitter are having somewhat of a tempestuous relationship so far. We’ve seen an athlete expelled from the games for posting a racist tweet, a member of the public arrested for sending malicious messages to a competitor, and now an account set up to help people secure official tickets for the 2012 London Olympics has been shut down.
With organisers struggling to fill the seats and members of the public becoming increasingly frustrated with the official Olympics ticket site’s seemingly Jekyll and Hyde-ish behaviour, one man tried to help out. Adam Naisbitt wrote a computer program that would check the official site to see when tickets for events were released. He would then share this information on Twitter (@2012TicketAlert) and managed to help hundreds of people buy tickets to watch the games.
However, he has now been stopped from providing this not-for-profit alert service. Writing on 2012ticketalert.com Mr Naisbitt had this to say:
“When we set out to code this on Sunday/Monday, we never anticipated where the idea would go… It just seemed like a cool idea which could make a difference, and that was enough for us to spend a lot of our time developing it… all with no prospect of making money from it or promoting our Company.”
He continued: “However, it seems someone at LOCOG has taken exception to our idea and instead of reaching out to us or addressing the lack of a notification system, they have simply blocked our access to their server. This means we are unable to check or post any new ticket alerts.”
Presumably LOCOG would be thankful that someone has taken the time to help them sell tickets without making a profit for themselves, but this is obviously not the case. Apparently this measure had to be taken to stop the ticketing site being accessed by touts who make automated purchases. Adam Naisbitt goes into further detail about what has happened and has a short FAQ section on the 2012ticketalert.com website.
Do you think LOCOG should have left this well alone, or were they right to block 2012TicketAlert to prevent touts from getting hold of tickets?
