Had this come my way over Twitter from a few folks. It's about a new service called TweepMe. It's being labeled as a fast way to accumulate followers on Twitter. Whenever a new member joins, every other member that's already on the service automatically follows the new member while the new member follows them back. The process is gradual and happens over the course of weeks or months depending on the number of TweepMe members and how quickly you have the service set up to do all that following. (The default is 50 an hour which seems very high to me. I just lowered mine to 10 to be on the safe side.)
Right now, the service is free to the first 5,000 users who create an account over there. As of this writing, there's about a thousand slots left open. After those first lucky few, rumor is it'll run $9 a month for the service.
Some folks are calling this a Twitter virus. Others are calling it nothing but spam or a complete waste of time getting followers who will quickly leave. Giving a service your username and password is a concern as well.
So which is it? Some points come to mind:
So what do you think? I'll admit that I signed up for the service just to see what all the hype is about. If I get new followers and/ or find someone new and interesting to follow, it's a plus. Get my Twitter account hacked from it all? It's a Twitter account after all, not a server.
What's your opinion?
edit: After writing this, I was pointed to a post about a user studying the TweepMe data to see if there are real people signing up or just spammers. It's an interesting read.
Right now, the service is free to the first 5,000 users who create an account over there. As of this writing, there's about a thousand slots left open. After those first lucky few, rumor is it'll run $9 a month for the service.
Some folks are calling this a Twitter virus. Others are calling it nothing but spam or a complete waste of time getting followers who will quickly leave. Giving a service your username and password is a concern as well.
So which is it? Some points come to mind:
- They've admitted to using the HummingBird Twitter application which got their old account banned.
- You do have to turn over your username and password which we should know by now isn't a good idea.
- They raise a good point that if Twitter really had an issue with all this, they would have their API access shut down.
- All messages sent are opt-in as we've signed up for the service knowing what to expect.
- Folks who have signed up for the service are free to leave at any time. They can even change their Twitter password to opt back out of the service.
- The Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, is a member of the service.
What's your opinion?
edit: After writing this, I was pointed to a post about a user studying the TweepMe data to see if there are real people signing up or just spammers. It's an interesting read.
I think it's pretty rubbish really, I only follow those I want to by looking at their profile and I've not seen the need to artificially increase my followers.
People should be looking at MrTweet or search.twitter.com if they want to find people to follow.
Cat | March 17, 2009 3:32 PM | Reply to this comment
Thanks for the comment, Cat. I've been using MrTweet as well lately although I have to admit that some of the recommendations that they've given me have been rather strange. They did allow me to figure out who was following me that I hadn't followed back. That was a plus.
TweepMe has now been suspended in case you've not seen it yet.
I've found that with my quite varied interests which I twitter about [off the top of my head: Gaming, TV shows, weather, knitting, photography, reading, travelling..] MrTweet doesn't give me any good recommendations and they are 99% just gaming related. Which in a way is fine as I'm still mostly in that community, but I can and already do meet people based on the recommendations of others.
All in all I've just hit 500 people that I'm following and I've been struggling to keep up, so I'm not actually looking for new people to follow currently!
Cat replied to comment from Dr. Mike | March 18, 2009 8:19 AM | Reply to this comment
Thanks Cat for the comment.
Cat, you and the other author are looking at the account that was suspended for their use of the Hummingbird program. You'll note that the article you point to is the old account, the one without the underline in it, not the new one, the one with the underline in it. I politely point out that I mention that in my article here. I do go and point that out on the article you linked to. As of me writing this, they had a comment no more than 25 minutes ago:
http://twitter.com/Tweep_Me/status/1348649480
I do agree though with MrTweet give some weird results. I noticed a number of them being followers of those folks that I do follow myself. I have a feeling that's why we're seeing them and not for any real content comparison.
Thanks for the link back, as you say its very interesting data, and pretty much exactly what I expected to see when I decided to scrape their pages.
I resent being called a user though, I wouldn't touch their service with a 10ft barge pole, I'm just a regular old nosy bugger who decided to scrape the user accounts from their front page :P
~Shepy
Shepy | March 18, 2009 10:12 AM | Reply to this comment
I've seen some interesting users this morning. Not sure if I'll follow them forever. But I'll give them a try. Thanks for the comment.
As to calling you a user, Shepy, sorry about that. I thought you were.
Ah, I see. I was only skimreading the article. I knew skimreading would come back to haunt me one day! ;)
Cat | March 19, 2009 5:35 AM | Reply to this comment
Not a problem, Cat. Thanks again for the comment.