Telegraph TwitterFAIL or Twitter CommunityFAIL?

I can't deny that yesterday's sabotage of The Telegraph's Twitter Fall feed was initially a fantastically amusing bit of Twitterverse mischief.  Seeing the F-word and the C-word smack bang on the paper's Budget 2009 page certainly raised a smile.

It didn't take long for news to spread that the feed, which picked up and published all live Twitter messages ('Tweets') including the tag #budget, was clearly unmoderated.

Yes it was funny. Yes it was naive of the paper to think they could leave the Twitter Fall unmoderated. But after the laughter subsided I did feel a sense of regret.

With Twitter now firmly in the mainstream, and the fortune of traditional media in rapid decline its no surprise The Telegraph decided to experiment in the hope of boosting popularity and interactivity with its brand.

It was a clumsy attempt. But maybe, instead of grasping the opportunity for a cheap laugh we should have welcomed their foray into social media, regardless of our feelings towards the newspaper, and welcomed them into the community by pointing out their schoolboy error?

Didn't the rush to jump on the 'screw the Telegraph' bandwagon just degrade the intelligence and creativity of the Twitter community slightly?

One comment that made it through before the Twitter Fall was removed from the Telegraph website that particularly bothered me was one declaring "Silly paper messing with technology it doesn't understand #budget".

Coming from a traditional media background I despise this them (Traditional media) vs us (social/new media) mentality. Isn't the idea to integrate the old and the new, and make it work better?

OK so much of the traditional media left it a bit late to get involved with new media, be it through fear, lack of understanding or sheer laziness. But they've finally realised that if they want to evolve and survive they have to get on board.

Why is this attempt met with such contempt? The Pack mentality to sabotage such an experiment is a negative side to the social web.

This wasn't a unified protest about anything in particular, like last week's outcry against Amazon's 'cataloguing glitch' of gay and lesbian literature, it was childish and pointless.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have fun with Twitter and other social media, but incidents like this may discourage other people, businesses and publications from embracing the social web's potential and using it to their benefit and to ours.

That, in my opinion, is a FAIL for the Twitter community.