Filed under: Web services, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twitter-Train - pyramid scheme for low-value Twitter followers
Is Twitter a popularity contest? If you think so, then you might be interested in Twitter-Train, but for the sane people reading this you'll probably want to move on.
Twitter-Train is essentially a pyramid scheme whereby if you follow a prescribed list of Twitter accounts, you will be added to that same list for the next 40 Twitter-Train users. Basically, by willfully polluting your Twitter stream with updates from Twitter accounts that you care nothing about, you get the benefit of being followed by 40 people that care nothing about you. That's a win-win if I ever saw one.
I mean seriously, what is the point of this? I can think of only one, and that would be if you somehow got paid to inflate an account's Twitter followers by any means possible. But in terms of real value, there is none to be had here. You now have to filter through tweets that mean nothing to you, and the "followers" that you acquire are essentially doing the same thing.
I suspect this is one of the reasons that Twitter has not yet added host-side filtering to the service (the other being that Twitter seems busy just keeping the service up). Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop offer client-side filtering, which allows you to "follow" huge amounts of people while actually ignoring them. While I suppose to each their own, it's still frustrating to see how users willfully abuse a system just to inflate their follower numbers to appear more important. Twitter seems to agree, given that they are disabling the auto-follow feature that had been enabled for certain select Twitter users.
I think Twitter should hide follower counts so that there is very little ego-boost from having a huge number of followers. This isn't going to stop people that want to use Twitter as a spamming service, but it will kill the ego game that is plaguing most social networks.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
AndrewNoNumbers said 12:48PM on 6-23-2009
This is bs. I personally don't care anything about how many people follow me, since I don't actually tweet myself.
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JPN said 2:04PM on 6-23-2009
The people that want this are the same people that friended every person they could find on MySpace to say they have over xxx friends, etc. I don't get it but some people just get of that number being huge even though it's truly pointless.
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Sam Jordan said 4:01PM on 6-23-2009
I have around 50 followers (altough 90% are probably spammers) and follow about 40 people.
I find that hard enough to keep up with, so I see no point in this at all.
I guess it's just for spammers or 'merketers'.
The dark side of Twitter.
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Christian said 7:07PM on 6-23-2009
I'm thinking more of a v-flight shape pattern than a pyramid...
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jain said 8:29PM on 7-03-2009
Please help me if you can -- I clicked through to twitter train from a link and just scrolled down their page -- didn't "join" or anything but I was logged in to Twitter when I clicked through.
THey have been sending their auto Tweets from my account every day or so. How do I get them to stop???? Any help please this is awful.
@jainlemos
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twittertrain said 12:31PM on 8-06-2009
to stop the auto tweets just change your password on twitter.com
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