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.

Interesting business stratagy

[lee1026]

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.

So what?

[onion2k]

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.

And Then..

[upto0013]

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

Re:So what?

[nem75]

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.

Re:So what?

[jrumney]

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.

Already get followers that I don't know

[sl149q]

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.

Re:Ummm...

[rsmith-mac]

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

Re:Already get followers that I don't know

[qreeves]

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.

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[DJRumpy]

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?

Re:What is this twitter btw?

[dave1791]

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.

Re:Already get followers that I don't know

[severoon]

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.