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.

Ummm...

[Opportunist]

I don't get it, is that like paying people to be your friend?

Re:Interesting business stratagy[sic]

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what?

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

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!

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[statemachine]

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

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[$1uck]

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?

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[DJRumpy]

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.

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[DJRumpy]

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.