Web 2.Spam
I've been using Twitter for a while now, and for the most part, I enjoy it. It's a good way to do quick connects with friends and family, share a quick little joke that's not really worth the rather more extensive process of honing a post here on LJ, and a good way to keep up with what's happening out in the rest of the world. It's also a good way to touch base with a larger community of interests. I have writing folks and coffee folks and music folks that I follow/am followed by on Twitter, and it works well. These are all the good parts of the social web and the distributed social interactions that have increasingly become a part of our lives (or at least those of us who live in that geeky, tech-forward world).
There's just one lurking problem - a serpent hanging in the tree of knowledge just waiting to chomp down hard and inject us full of canned processed meat-like substance. It's Tweet spam, and it drives me nuts.
Multiple times a week, I'll get the message that someone new is following me on Twitter. I'll go and take a look and find that whoever this person is (and there are times when I seriously doubt that it's an actual flesh-and-blood person) has posted not a single tweet of any personal import, but instead has a timeline full of hourly tweets about how to leverage the social web for marketing or how to get more Twitter followers, and every tweet has a bit.ly URL that probably goes to some marketing scam site, or maybe to a site that wants to install malware on your computer and impress your system into their growing bot army. If it's not marketing scams, it's some 'hot babe' making hourly tweets about how she's at her webcam right now and she's soooooooo lonely. The amateur porn scams at least get removed pretty quickly by Twitter, but the marketing ones persist and I block them because I have no interest in being followed by somebody(thing) that has never made even a single tweet to indicate that they're any sort of human being. But the marketing snake keeps coming back.
Why? Because it's keyword-driven spam. Someone, probably multiple someones, developed 'bots that look for keywords in Twitter's master timeline and then automatically follow anyone who uses one of those keywords in a tweet. Don't believe me? Try it. Tweet a single word, 'marketing' and then see how many new followers you get. Or try 'follow me'. Then go look at the timelines of they people who start following you before you block them. These 'bots don't follow Asimov's three laws, they're out to do you harm. They want to harvest you. Some companies pay people to stick ads in their Twitter timeline, and the more followers you have, the more they'll pay. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who does that isn't being 'social', but working at becoming parasites, and parasites are anti-social indeed.
I still think that the social web is a good thing, and also that it can be a powerful marketing tool if it's used properly, but I don't believe that good marketing should be universally intrusive in the thoroughly obnoxious way most of these brain-dead zombie marketing 'bots are. When all you have to sell is an unproven method of selling something, it's probably time to rethink your business strategy.
I would dearly love to have a list of the keywords that trigger these 'bots, though. Then I'd start a new Twitter account and see how many spammers I can accumulate. First one to a millions followers wins!
There's just one lurking problem - a serpent hanging in the tree of knowledge just waiting to chomp down hard and inject us full of canned processed meat-like substance. It's Tweet spam, and it drives me nuts.
Multiple times a week, I'll get the message that someone new is following me on Twitter. I'll go and take a look and find that whoever this person is (and there are times when I seriously doubt that it's an actual flesh-and-blood person) has posted not a single tweet of any personal import, but instead has a timeline full of hourly tweets about how to leverage the social web for marketing or how to get more Twitter followers, and every tweet has a bit.ly URL that probably goes to some marketing scam site, or maybe to a site that wants to install malware on your computer and impress your system into their growing bot army. If it's not marketing scams, it's some 'hot babe' making hourly tweets about how she's at her webcam right now and she's soooooooo lonely. The amateur porn scams at least get removed pretty quickly by Twitter, but the marketing ones persist and I block them because I have no interest in being followed by somebody(thing) that has never made even a single tweet to indicate that they're any sort of human being. But the marketing snake keeps coming back.
Why? Because it's keyword-driven spam. Someone, probably multiple someones, developed 'bots that look for keywords in Twitter's master timeline and then automatically follow anyone who uses one of those keywords in a tweet. Don't believe me? Try it. Tweet a single word, 'marketing' and then see how many new followers you get. Or try 'follow me'. Then go look at the timelines of they people who start following you before you block them. These 'bots don't follow Asimov's three laws, they're out to do you harm. They want to harvest you. Some companies pay people to stick ads in their Twitter timeline, and the more followers you have, the more they'll pay. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who does that isn't being 'social', but working at becoming parasites, and parasites are anti-social indeed.
I still think that the social web is a good thing, and also that it can be a powerful marketing tool if it's used properly, but I don't believe that good marketing should be universally intrusive in the thoroughly obnoxious way most of these brain-dead zombie marketing 'bots are. When all you have to sell is an unproven method of selling something, it's probably time to rethink your business strategy.
I would dearly love to have a list of the keywords that trigger these 'bots, though. Then I'd start a new Twitter account and see how many spammers I can accumulate. First one to a millions followers wins!