uSocial Sells Twitter Followers By the Thousand 118
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 this twitter btw? (Score:3, Funny)
What is actually this twitter thing?
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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
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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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And this is what's wrong with the twitter crowd.
And this is what's wrong with your assumptions - there isn't "a" Twitter crowd. It's used by many types of people in many ways. For me, it's useful because it's connected to my phone. As far as I'm concerned, it's my phone's text messaging, attached to a megaphone. The system is rapid, and succinct. My real friends and I have real lives, we update the group about whatever - plans, the ongoing day, delays - and as a result we spend more time hanging out than we do trying to figure out where to meet or wh
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Et Tu Youtube (Score:2)
And I thought only Hulu were anal about copyright restrictions.
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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.
Harvard also confirms twitter is gay ... (Score:2)
It doesn't mention mac usage ...
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omg. twitter made me a gay :(
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While that might be taken to mean that most twitter users are gay, it's probably more likely to mean that, since twitter focuses on text, men are more likely to be interested in what men have to say vs. what women have to say. On other sites you're looking at people's pictures, on twitter you're reading what they have to say. Incidentally, women are also more likely to follow men on Twitter (even though the majority of users are women), so women probably also don't care what other women have to say.
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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One day those sock puppet accounts will become self aware. We'd all be in mortal peril, except they'll be stymied by somehow stumbling across craigslist personals, and a mobius of spam will cause the system to be erased from the timeline.
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It's already happened [slashdot.org].
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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.
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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.
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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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Furthermore, where's MY ten cents?
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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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That's not showing the entire story. Just like the 90-9-1 rule, most people using Twitter are reading others, you don't need to even make that first post to accomplish that, but most typically try anyway as the sign-up process walks you through it.
What they don't realize is you don't need to make an account to read either. Many of my friends follow me via email and RSS instead of via their own Twitter account. And of those with Twitter accounts, most don't update daily, but only when they have something
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The median twitter user [itnews.com.au] makes one post, then abandons the account.
I did that on purpose. [twitter.com]
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Yup. That's me. I just signed up and spammed a single post to get a free app as part of MacHeist. I'll be a whole bunch of people did this.
I logged in a couple of months to see if anything was up with the account, but nothing was.
For me, I'd probably put the effort into a facebook page for my friends, rather than the occasional blurt.
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.
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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I'm as worried about this uSocial crap destroying Twitter as I am someone running over Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps. In fact, I'd view it as equally good news should any of those things happen.
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Idiots with money. Isn't it what it's all about? The point is getting people to buy what you tweet about. Having enough followers can be worth money. So with enough followers your tweet can go something like "gee, I'm stuck in LA traffic again. But my new Lexus makes it so much more pleasant." Lexus get also the tweet and sends you $5.00 for the publicity.
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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
Those people are the best targets for marketing campaigns.
The true price! (Score:5, Funny)
SO now we know what the current price of a twit is!
10 cents a month.
What good is it... (Score:1)
...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...
Narcissism (Score:1)
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.
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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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And you, my friend, are a giant dork.
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Are you serious? "Check their Twits"?
Tweets, people. Tweets!
You use twitter to tweet. You are a twit or Twitter user. You tweet. Tweeting is what twits do. "
There, fixed that for you.
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Yep - they're spammers, but who are they spamming? I don't Follow them in return, so I never see a single word from those accounts. I just see the numbers of Followers going up at no cost to me.
As for the complaints about people tweeting "I'm on the John" or whatever: you don't have to put up with that. Un-follow. Problem solved, unless you're the one tweeting such crud, in which case I don't know you.
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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.
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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.
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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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
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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.
oblig cartoon (Score:2)
i know a guy that will follow you (Score:1, Funny)
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.
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.
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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.
Spam Traps (Score:1)
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They do, and you can easily report spam [twitter.com].
If you look for the profiles of some of the random followers people have mentioned here, often they are gone, having already been removed from the system.
They are also ridiculously easy to spot, like this one today:
chaoticPri73400
Beth Agrell
hi£ÂMy friends! I recommends a website which can reduce your electric bill by 80%. URL REMOVED It's 7:38 am 6 days ago
"She" is following 1,603 people and has nearly none following "her", never mind her sexy pictur
Eighth Grade Math? (Score:1)