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.