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14/04/08 Twitter: Nobody Expected The Spammish Inquisition!
SINGAPORE - I was greeted to my inbox this morning with the beautiful sight below, 15 new Twitter followers in 2 days - not bad for a weekend!
Unfortunately after inspection - they all have one of the following criteria:
- 1,000-5,000 followers.
- An empty bio except for a URL.
- A sales pitch or product name as a username e.g. ‘@makemoneyonline’
- I had been followed numerous times before by the same account.
Here’s what I believe is happening - these are spam. Albeit interactive spam, but still spam in all its glory.
The new technique is to add no details to your bio, just a web address, set up a feed to post continuous tweets of third-party news automatically to make it look like the lights are on and then try and ‘follow’ as many accounts of as possible. We are a key market of ‘early adopters’ likely to sneeze their idea. People who are chuffed to be followed click-though to the URL to try and work out who their new ‘follower’ is as there is no name given.
It gets better - everytime they unfollow & follow you again you get an email from Twitter about your renewed subscriber, prompting yet another visit or click-through. Many people are now simply ignoring followers following 500+ people as they may be spam, or it’ll be impossible to have a conversation with them amongst the noise anyway.
Could it get any better? Yes! They’ve now got intelligent to this and from evidence in my inbox, are creating multiple accounts and distributing the 1000’s of followers across the multiple accounts in blocks of 150 or so (presumably using the API).
With great popularity comes great spam.
Sorry Twitter.
-Robin.
More thoughts: I just noticed @JasonCalacanis has 19,759 followers. Imagine the scale of this - every tweet he sends could send up to 19,759 SMS messages if they were all activated. That would cost Twitter $1,975.00 per tweet at consumer rates ($0.10)!
Tags: following, microblogging, spam, subscribing, twitter
9 Comments
I’m experiencing the same issue. I’m making a quick assessment based on their numbers in most cases. Still a pain to deal with.
I’m now up to 34 spam follows since Apr 9th. I’ve not got a clue how this will play out but I’m close to closing down my ‘email’ alerts for new follows.
The costs aren’t to twitter. In the US you pay to receive texts (or so it seems). That means that in the US, Twitter is a money earner, and why they make it really hard to be sent SMSs outside of the US.
You pay to send or receive!
Crazy stuff.
14/04/08 Stop Twitter Spam » Robin Blandford - The Spammish Inquisition
[...] Robin Blandford, byte Surgery (04/14/08) This entry was written by admin and posted on April 14, 2008 at 7:51 am and filed [...]
Yup, I finally gave in and set my account to Protected Updates last week. Just got sick of weeding through the Spam Twitterers, or Spitters are I like to call them! :)
The curse of being popular
[...] Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ] » Blog Archive » Twitter: Nobody E… With great popularity comes great spam. Sorry Twitter. (tags: twitter spam) [...]
You have to cull your blog reads, your RSS subscriptions, your podcasts, and your mail. Sometimes you filter that stuff. Other times, you simply stop subscribing. Twitter has always been more chatter than conversation, Now more brands tack themselves onto my account as followers than real people. I have to wonder if their presence is part of the Biz Stone business model for Twitter.
