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uSocial Sells Twitter Followers By the Thousand

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the how-to-know-when-you've-jumped-the-shark dept.

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.

31 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. What is this twitter btw? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    What is actually this twitter thing?

    1. Re:What is this twitter btw? by DJRumpy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      At least someone said it to the masses. The 'A-List' twits are Narcissistic to the core. I'll admit that in some very specific circumstances, it could be a useful tool, but only in the fact that it mimics a crippled IM client. I'm talking about live blogging/chat sessions about breaking news and such. In all other cases, it's pretty much a total waste of time and energy not to put too fine a point on it. These folks are either desperate for recognition of any sort, or they simply live such boring lives that they need to gain followers to validate their mundane existence.

      What shocked me is that some of my friends actually wanted me to join twitter. Yeah, I'm a techie geek with the best of them, but I really see no need to known that someone's toilet paper is too abrasive, or that the traffic driving home sucks. Are people's lives really so empty that they need to feel 'followed' for validation?

    2. Re:What is this twitter btw? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Funny

      He's a long-standing Slashdot troll, known for rabidly anti-MS (always spelt M$) posts and operating a dozen or so sockpuppet accounts. Apparently there's some social networking / microblogging thingy named after him too.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:What is this twitter btw? by statemachine · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Are any of your friends ones that you don't see regularly? Maybe they just simply want to keep up with you.

    4. Re:What is this twitter btw? by $1uck · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    5. Re:What is this twitter btw? by DJRumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do you really need to tell 20 people that traffic sucks? I can't think of a single person that woudl find that relevant unless an accident happened right outside of the work parking lot. How many drive the exact same way home as you? In addition, if I'm that interested in traffic, I just look at the GPS.

      As to your travel plans, if they were good friends, they would either know you were going out of town, or if they were coming in to town they would actually pick up the phone and call you. I can't think of a single time when a friend was visiting and I didn't know weeks in advance due to a phone call. What kind of friend would just drop a tweet to you while in town on the off chance you might see it? They would pick up the phone and call.

    6. Re:What is this twitter btw? by dave1791 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For that, things like Facebook are better; not for technical, but cultural reasons. On FB, people tend to give fewer â" but more weighty - updates than on twitter. This means that the 70 or so friends and family I'm tracking are not spamming that they are now having a cup of coffee and now eating lunch and now taking a dump. Whenever some twit starts feeding his twittering into FB and spamming all over the place, I filter him out.

    7. Re:What is this twitter btw? by DJRumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. Interesting business stratagy by lee1026 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Interesting business stratagy by Presto+Vivace · · Score: 3, Funny

      What I don't get is who came up with this metric that a Twitter follower is worth 10 cents. I just don't believe it.

  3. So what? by onion2k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:So what? by nem75 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

      So is it really a waste then? Presuming that someone who pays to get followers is trying to sell something in turn, this might not be such a waste. Sure, the followers would be idiots. And fool ... money ... soon to part - I guess you see what I'm getting at.

    2. Re:So what? by jrumney · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's a problem because it will be used for search engine spamming, with the result that free speech such as we're seeing out of Iran that makes use of Twitter to spread itself gets lowered search rankings by association when the search engines react to the new source of spam.

    3. Re:So what? by whyloginwhysubscribe · · Score: 2, Insightful

      All links on twitter are marked "nofollow" anyway - so I don't think that makes it a problem for search engines...

      I think that the problem is related to the weight of validity you associate with what someone says, and how many people are following them. If someone has lots of followers, it seems like a good indication that they are worth listening to - but it doesn't take much reading to work out whether this is the case or not... and I guess usually on twitter it is not!

    4. Re:So what? by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Informative

      ... because nothing says "loser" so much as "I'll pay you to be my friend."

      The median twitter user makes one post, then abandons the account.

  4. The true price! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    SO now we know what the current price of a twit is!

    10 cents a month.

  5. And Then.. by upto0013 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And then, Candi Nipson the Twitter porn spammer has 100,000 followers.

  6. yFollow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    uSocial?

    iWon't.

    Burma Shave!

  7. Ummm... by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. Re:Ummm... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It sounds like it's closer to paying people to be your groupie, since it's not an equal peer-peer relationship.

    2. Re:Ummm... by Patrik_AKA_RedX · · Score: 2, Funny

      A dating service for imaginary friends! How... fucked up actualy.

  8. How will it continue? by tokyoahead · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  9. Already get followers that I don't know by sl149q · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Already get followers that I don't know by qreeves · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Check their Twits; you'll find more often than not that they're spammers. Some people are just so glad to have a follower they don't realise it.

    2. Re:Already get followers that I don't know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I don't use twitter but signed up just to reserve my name...

      Damnit... *I* wanted to register sl149q!

      You wouldn't consider selling it..?

    3. Re:Already get followers that I don't know by Punto · · Score: 2, Funny

      I find your ideas intriguing and would like you follow you on twitter.

      --

      --
      Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!

    4. Re:Already get followers that I don't know by severoon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Are you serious? "Check their Twits"?

      Tweets, people. Tweets!

      You use twitter to tweet. You are a twitterer or Twitter user. You tweet. Tweeting is what twitterers do. "Twit" is someone who doesn't get this.

      --
      but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
  10. a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month.

    Dead or alive?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 by Exitar · · Score: 2

      What's the difference?

  11. Re:Ugh by Allicorn · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!!!
  12. Great article by roesti · · Score: 2, Funny

    Great article. Totally tweeting this.

    --
    Attack its weak point for massive damage!