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uSocial Sells Twitter Followers By the Thousand
bfire writes to tell us that marketing firm uSocial has decided to apply a new monetization scheme to the Twitter service by providing packages of followers for purchase. "According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year." This is just the latest in a number of different exploits and problems of the Twitter universe as individuals try to subvert a popular tool into a self-serving device.
What is actually this twitter thing?
Essentially, what they do is they recommend people to subscribe to certain feeds, and then charges the feeds for it. Not entirely a bad idea. What is unknown here is how in the world they actually plan to get people to actually subscribe to those feeds. In the worst case, they have a bunch of sock puppet accounts.
The service that uSocial are offering is neither an exploit nor a problem. They're not spamming anyone - they're just letting people have access to a pool of people open to "following back" and taking a fee. It's a total waste of money buying in because the sort of people who'll follow everyone and care about the number of followers they have are generally idiots, but it's not really anything to worry about.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
was rather hoping for this fad to die
SO now we know what the current price of a twit is!
10 cents a month.
...to have a thousand chinese goldfarmers following my tweets?
I can see someone paying money to have followers in a certain target demographics, but only buying followers from the internet at large does not seem to make sense...
if followed by a huge number of ppl who don't really care much about u, just ignore ur tweets, what's use for the money?
so who's the tool and what's the device?
they recommend people to subscribe to certain feeds, and then charges the feeds for it. Not entirely a bad idea.
If it serves to hasten the demise of Twitter, it's a great idea. Maybe the sheeple can go find something more worthwhile to do than go "Baaaa! Baaa!" at each other instead. But I guess it would be stupid to underestimate the inanity of people in large numbers...
And then, Candi Nipson the Twitter porn spammer has 100,000 followers.
uSocial?
iWon't.
Burma Shave!
I don't get it, is that like paying people to be your friend?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. All nerds try to compensate their lack of FB friends by buying fake twitter followers. FB is deserted and closes down.
2. uSocial tries to save money & starts to sell all followers to several customers.
3. uSocial has to create 50 million fake followers since Kim Jong Il wants that many, but the North Koreans have only 5 PCs.
4. All the aforementioned outcasts get investigated by the NSA for their connection to Kim Jong Il, and get send to Gitmo as long as it's still open.
5. The US collapses because of the lack of IT personnel and a not properly disinfected telephone.
6. Castro takes over Gitmo and makes it the worlds most secure & cheap IT call center.
7. India collapses too, because of unemployment.
8. China buys India & the US.
Better start learning Mandarin!
no sig
for example, the thousands of people who flock to any forum they can find in order to use a term they read on some other forum or heard on the radio and thought was oh-so-clever.
I don't use twitter but signed up just to reserve my name... What is interesting is that I get one or two "followers" a week, and they are people who I have never heard of. And I suspect that would really have no particular reason to follow my (non-existent) tweets... It could just be accidental but it seems like too many for that.
sheeple=Sheep/human(people)=Apple fan-boys many twitter users are not sheeple.
Dead or alive?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Im sick of twitter and constantly hearing about it cuz its the latest craze or "in" thing...
I just shudder to think what the next big "social networking experiment" (read as internet craze shit out by idiots whose ideas, while on paper, seem innocent and ambicious, end up causing shit storm sheeple fuck-fests) will be...
what a waste of server space...
My blood hurts...
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2009/06/30/
BBC reports that uSocial, a social media marketing company based in Australia, has launched a paid service to find followers for Twitter users for a fee of $87 for a block of 1,000. The company finds potential followers by searching through Twitter to discover areas of common interest to match people more closely. uSocial then send these potential followers a message, alerting them that there is someone on Twitter they might want to follow and the potential follower then decides whether or not to follow that person. "A woman who runs yoga classes is one of our clients," says Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial,. "So are some religious organizations including one man that just wants to get the word out about God. Twitter started as a way for just friends to keep in touch, but as with any social media site once they get big, every business or marketer jumps on the bandwagon. It's an excellent marketing medium." Some commentators have expressed concerns that this sort of practice could lead to an increase in "Twitter spam", as users are bombarded with irrelevant tweets. "As a Twitter user, I only want to follow people whose tweets I like, and only expect to be followed by people who find my tweets worth the time," writes Harry McCracken, a technology expert. "I know that I'd rather have fifty engaged followers than 5,000 whose attention I had to pay for."
Heck, I know a guy that will follow you for free! Sure, he peeps in though your windows at night and for the most part he's harmless.
This is going to surprise the hell out of you, but that term existing long before Apple became 'cool'. Hell, it probably existed before Apple did.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I finally gave in and made a twitter account last week, and I already have four followers, none of whom are people I know online or off. Seems to me you get enough random followers no matter WHAT you do. ;o
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Great article. Totally tweeting this.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
When you manage to gather enough gullible people together in one service, it's inevitable that they are going to be exploited. What, after all, is even the point of twitter if you weren't going to somehow make money off its users?
The twitter audience is ripe for exploitation: not overly bright, slaves to peer pressure, naive, shallow, celebutard-obsessed, narcissistic and self-obsessed. That's pure gold, right there.
It was only a question of time before someone started farming those sheeple.
It doesn't mention mac usage ...
There are people who like to say "I have A THOUSAND followers!!" much like Dr. Evil thought he was oh-so-impressive demanding "one MILLION dollars!!". On the surface it sounds good to have so many followers, and these sorts of people are probably boasting to non-twitterers (non-twits?) who won't know any better. Kind of like how some bloggers cite the number of hits they get -- not the number of unique visitors. Ego inflation pure and simple. Been around since the dawn of humanity ("hurrr me have bigger stick!!!") and will likely be around until its sunset.
The only solution I thought of was to have spam traps in place over twitter. If they keep using buzzwords then they can catch the amount of spam and other rubbish that keeps following people. Marketers are OK but the amount of other rubbish is mortifying. Hopefully they already have something like this in place?
" uSocial Sells Twitter Followers By the Thousand"
Its confirmed Twitter has thousands of sockpuppet accounts? Is usocial going to update the sock disclosure list?
Maybe its just me, but the odds they gave are wrong. with 20,000 entries, and 10 laptops, the odds would be 1 in 20,000 of winning. not 1 in 200,000 as the article states.
And I thought only Hulu were anal about copyright restrictions.
May the Maths Be with you!