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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
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...
so who's the tool and what's the device?
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.
Dead or alive?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2009/06/30/
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
Well, lets figure it out right here and now eh?
First, take a perfectly basic function of some Internet feature or other that is already available to everyone without there being any need for your proposed service to exist. Lets think... here's one: web pages can have various colors on them! Now dilute that feature right down to just the barest, minimal, infinitesimally useful level... a web page that is just a blank space of a user configurable color. Crippling this basic functionality that folks had access to already makes your service seem edgy, sleek and modern! Giving our default color palette some snappy names like "emo purple" or "douchey green" will make users feel like there's a new cultural or linguistic fad here to get stuck into.
Slap on a "friends" feature to give it a little of that social networking pizazz and add a nonsense-word domain name of the type that you might overhear on an episode of The Tellytubbies, lets say, "flibubu" and you've got yourself a vehicle capable of launching a whole new 6-month-long Internet fad!
And there you have it. What a time to be alive!
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
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?
I think I will follow you on Twitter so I can make sure I get updated on the progress of this ground breaking idea of yours.
Or perhaps I will just go and Bing Flibubu...
~jaraxle
The scary thing - of course - is with the right marketing you could probably even do it and have some degree of success.
"Just as we were all starting to realise the empty, futility of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace - here comes 'Flibubu' - the new bright, sassy, color-based nano-blogging service that's got the whole Internet buzzing all over again!", Wired.com - sometime late in 2009.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
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!