Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I don't know about you I'm interested in knowing if the traffic sucks. Maybe I can find a different way home. I'm interested to know when my friends from out of town/out of state are coming to town. Posting to twitter is a lot easier than emailing/im'ing twenty different people. It also means when you post something it's going out to only those people who actually are interested in seeing it. I think your thoughts about why other people use twitter is more telling about you as a person than anything else really. Why do you need to disparage the tools of others? what kind of person needs that sort of validation?
And this is what's wrong with the twitter crowd. You assume you can determine someone's mood just from a few lines of text. You have imaginary relationships with people which mean pretty much nothing. I would imagine most followers who aren't already friends or family will probably never meet you and they will know nothing about you other than what you tell them in a few lines of text.
It's all just a sort of make believe friendship. I have quite a few social networking accounts outside of twitter. People who 'add' me as a friend mean pretty much nothing and they are taken at face value. I will probably never meet those people, and other than the occasional e-mail, they rate right up there with 'acquaintance'. They are unimportant in my life. If I happen to actually meet some acquaintance in real life, then they have the possibility of becoming an actual friend. My real friends however, are important, they matter, and I actually socialize with them in the real world on a regular basis. I learn things about them just by hanging around with them, and that's the way a friendship should work.