Comments: 118 +- Technology: uSocial Sells Twitter Followers By the Thousand on Monday July 06, @02:34AM
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday July 06, @02:34AM
from the how-to-know-when-you've-jumped-the-shark dept.
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.
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Submission: Usocial sells Twitter followers by the thousand by Anonymous Coward
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What is this twitter btw? (Score:3, Funny)
What is actually this twitter thing?
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Maybe this will help [lmgtfy.com]
Re:What is this twitter btw? (Score:4, Funny)
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From the name I would guess that it's a social site for twits.
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Are any of your friends ones that you don't see regularly? Maybe they just simply want to keep up with you.
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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:What is this twitter btw? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 o
Re:What is this twitter btw? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Harvard also confirms twitter is gay ... (Score:2)
It doesn't mention mac usage ...
Interesting business stratagy (Score:5, 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.
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Do they also sell gmail invites? I think I have a few of those under the mattress.
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how in the world they actually plan to get people to actually subscribe to those feeds
by sharing some of that $.1 they charge with them?
Re:Interesting business stratagy (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
So what? (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.
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It's a total waste of money buying in
There are lots of narcistic people in the world and they may pay for all those fans who follow their precious self.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
The median twitter user [itnews.com.au] makes one post, then abandons the account.
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Re:So what? (Score:4, 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.
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Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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!
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The true price! (Score:5, Funny)
SO now we know what the current price of a twit is!
10 cents a month.
okay (Score:2)
And Then.. (Score:2, Interesting)
yFollow (Score:5, Funny)
uSocial?
iWon't.
Burma Shave!
Ummm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it, is that like paying people to be your friend?
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It sounds like it's closer to paying people to be your groupie, since it's not an equal peer-peer relationship.
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I don't get it, is that like paying people to be your friend?
Yeah, but the fraternity system is already saturated...
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How will it continue? (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!
Already get followers that I don't know (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Already get followers that I don't know (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.
Parent
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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.
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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..?
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I find your ideas intriguing and would like you follow you on twitter.
a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 (Score:5, Funny)
Dead or alive?
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Unfortunately there aren't enough requests for the dead ones, so they're all still alive :\
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What's the difference?
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According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month.
Dead or alive?
What's the difference?
You get less spam from the dead ones.
oblig cartoon (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
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
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I think you are given some random people to follow when you join, not sure why. Most of my random followers seem to be spam, but there are some real people in there.
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I made one last year. At the time, I was following the Silicon Valley VC bloggers because I was thinking of founding a startup. Those people would not shut up about twitter, so I checked it out. After my median one tweet (and deciding that the whole VC scene is about navel gazing), I never logged in again and I'm not even sure what my password is anymore.
But I still get emails about once a week that XYZ is now following me.
Great article (Score:3, Funny)
Great article. Totally tweeting this.
Not surprised (Score:2)
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.
Re:Ugh (Score:4, 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!
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