15 ms·

Twitter Should Shut Me Down

• johndavidback 13y ago
  My first thought is: This is a great way to get their attention. If you've been surreptitiously flying under the radar up until now, I think that stage is long gone. On the flip side, maybe instead of shutting you down, they should acquire you and then shut you down. That's a win-win, right?
  • niggler 13y ago
    Why would they acquire him when they could shut him down and replicate the service? It's not like they have much of a reputation to maintain. He doesn't have extremely significant traction (otherwise they would have done something by now) and AFAICT he doesn't hold any patents. To clarify: I don't mean to disparage him, but acquisitions have to bring some sort of value to the acquirer.
    • corin_ 13y ago
      The value could well be in the person they pick up rather than his product (or there could well be bits of the product that are genuinely useful to them, and a potentially interesting customer base)
    • roc 13y ago
      The cost to Twitter of even re-discovering what it is about his API and analytics that his customers prefer to Twitter Ads could easily outweigh the cost of an acqui-hire.
    • jonknee 13y ago
      He is monetizing Twitter in a way that advertisers like better than what Twitter's own advertising department came up with. That has to be worth something to a company desperate for revenue.
      • adventured 13y ago
        Given the small scale of the data points in question, there's no way to make the claim that advertisers in general like his product more than Twitter's. Even if I find that entirely plausible, I have to disagree with making such a dramatic statement without much larger scale testing. Even in the case of this all being true, the real problem is the ability of in-house people to ignore reality and refuse to favor a not-made-here product. Always difficult to tell which way the wind will blow on that. Companies make really stupid decisions all the time.
      • unreal37 13y ago
        Forget ads, advertisers would love to be able to pay to increase their follower counts. Like a force follow feature. Make it $1 for every follower, straight-up no ads or nothing. For $100,000 I can get 100,000 more real human followers on my account. Advertisers would love that better than promoted tweets or bot favorites. But is that good for the users?
    • unreal37 13y ago
      Why would they replicate this service? They'd "destroy" the function of favorites for some revenue? Are they that desperate? These aren't ads. These are "person abc favorited your tweet" notifications that the mobile twitter client pops up, and twitter emails you. If that gets overrun by spam (a) people will turn them off and (b) favorites will be useless as a mechanism for displaying "top tweets" like they do.
  • perlgeek 13y ago
    Or they could first shut him down, and then try to acquire very cheaply. It's a very precarious situation to be in.
• Swizec 13y ago
  This is just an amazing story. Love it.
• k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Even before Twitter's recent aggressive behavior towards developers I would have expected this to get shut down. If this became something widely used Twitter value to me would decline. The entire favorite feature would just start to be ignored by a majority of users.
  • ramayac 13y ago
    I think the favorite feature should be a private thing, just something to save for later or remember, at least that's what I'm using it for.
  • joyeuse6701 13y ago
    I agree, it's a social hack of sorts that he's using for advertisement, which is cool, but abuse of it would render favorites meaningless and it would become spam. However, I could see how if @pepsi wanted to favorite a tweet by @averagejoe because it said 'this new pepsi can is awesome!' it would seem legitimate enough and not spammy.
    • vickytnz 13y ago
      Yeah, savvy companies are getting away from the annoying "RT every nice thing people say about my company" with 'fave it and then point the faves at people if they want testimonials". Hostgator does this well: http://twitter.com/hostgator/favorites http://twitter.com/hostgator/favorites
      • fudged71 13y ago
        I don't understand what you mean by "point the faves at people if they want testimonials". Looks to me like they're just favoriting positive feedback that is sent to them
      • ohashi 13y ago
        If you want to see both sides of that, I actually track positive and negative mentions and do some analytics too. Same company: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/1/hostgator/ http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/1/hostgator/
• PaulHoule 13y ago
  Yeah, it's really hard to get in touch with anybody at Twitter. My account has been hosed for two weeks, I log in and just get an error message -- once I log in I can't even view the help page. And of course, there's no option on their forms for the problem I'm actually having. I've been thinking about sending a fax to their number for law enforcement queries since somebody might at least see it before they throw it away.
  • kmfrk 13y ago
    Even the AP Twitter accounts are taking eons to bring back from suspension. Twitter haven't exactly streamlined that process, to say the least.
    • PaulHoule 13y ago
      Honestly I don't know if I'm suspended or not. I'm certainly not getting a message saying that I am, but I could be hellbanned in some special way. It definitely makes me question if Twitter is going to be part of my life and the web sites I make in the future though.
  • mjmahone17 13y ago
    Even trying to get someone there to go through the hiring process is nearly impossible. Getting their campus recruiter to respond (even though he was the one who reached out to us) was a pain for everyone I know who has tried. After receiving the response of "Yeah, we will interview you!" I had to email him around 5 times before he finally responded with the "give me some interview availability" email. And after the first phone interview, despite the interviewer being super excited and telling me I'd have another round, all I got from the recruiter was silence. One of my friends who applied, was told he had to email the recruiter daily in order to expect a response. And then ended up being called in the middle of class, because the recruiter never bothered to tell him he had scheduled an interview for him.
• mihok 13y ago
  I couldn't find a link to your startup anywhere, do you have a link?
  • mathiasben 13y ago
    https://followgen.com/ https://followgen.com/
    • mihok 13y ago
      Thanks!
    • niggler 13y ago
      SSL cert issues (according to chrome for ipad)
      • mathiasben 13y ago
        didn't get that w/ IE10 on W7
        • dschep 13y ago
          It's probably missing an intermediate cert. Firefox and Chrome for mobile warn about that, but not desktop Chrome (and it seems some versions of IE)
      • lucian1900 13y ago
        Or on Chrome on OS X. Check your device and connection, someone might be trying to MITM you.
      • Anderkent 13y ago
        Chrome on linux is happy with it.
        • R41p4t4ng 13y ago
          I use Chrome
• denzil_correa 13y ago
  I receive an Internal Server Error. Here's a link to the cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-should-shut-me-down&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-should-shut-me-down&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
  • jwr 13y ago
    Twitter listened.
    • fusiongyro 13y ago
      How could Twitter shut down his blog?
      • astrodust 13y ago
        Karma police.
        • fusiongyro 13y ago
          You only have to put up with it for a few more days. Once my antidepressants kick in I'll go back to one comment a week.
      • mixedbit 13y ago
        From a purely technical perspective they could using platform.twitter.com/widgets.js that the blog includes.
        • fusiongyro 13y ago
          I don't think that would result in an internal server error.
          • mixedbit 13y ago
• macspoofing 13y ago
  It's amazing how much devs want to build on top of Twitter. There's got to be an opportunity for Twitter to monetize that instead of fighting it and pissing everyone off. Why can't they just have some reasonable fees for API access?
  • ecaradec 13y ago
    Or just a share on ads like adsense does...
  • mootothemax 13y ago
    There's got to be an opportunity for Twitter to monetize that instead of fighting it and pissing everyone off. Agreed, and speaking personally, I would love to pay Twitter $XXX/month, especially if it included some form of "we'll reply to X emails within an hour" support. The fact that they're not even charging $20/month for minimal API access is baffling to me. I'd expect it'd only help reduce spam as well!
    • Guvante 13y ago
      > The fact that they're not even charging $20/month for minimal API access is baffling to me. The devs who experiment and make something cool are often worth more than the minimal charge. However I would agree that rather than having arbitrary limits using devs as a revenue stream makes sense (give everyone a portion of what you currently allow and allow payed upgrades)
      • mootothemax 13y ago
        give everyone a portion of what you currently allow and allow payed upgrades Exactly - there are plenty of options available. The devs who experiment and make something cool are often worth more than the minimal charge. I'm just wondering how many such developers would be put off by such a relatively small charge? Obviously, the situation now is very different to when Twitter was still building momentum. I'm just confused that they don't come out and say "From the 1st of May, we will be charging all new API accounts for access."
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• AznHisoka 13y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but this service automates the process of favoriting someone's tweet? What was the conversion rate in terms of someone following you back if you favorited their tweet?
  • fudged71 13y ago
    Yes, that's what the service does. He claims that it worked really well and people were willing to pay $50/month for it, so there must have been a decent conversion.
• AznHisoka 13y ago
  "My data showed the cost of a real, targeted follower on my platform was about 12 cents, versus $2.50 on Twitter Ads" The cost is lower, but can someone do studies on the lifetime REVENUE of a real, targeted follower? It might all be meaningless if that number is 0.01 cents.
  • mhaymo 13y ago
    That people are willing to pay $2.50 implies that the value is at least $2.50. Of course it depends on how effective you are at getting value from your followers, so for many, the answer is close to 0 cents.
    • corin_ 13y ago
      No, they could be completely different demographics. I'm personally much more likely to follow a twitter account I see in an advert (if it interests me) than a random account that favorites a tweet (which I will 100% ignore). There may also be people out there who are happy to follow anyone who favorites their tweet, but aren't at all desirable to advertisers and don't get shown that many adverts. This isn't exclusive to Twitter. Not every person is worth the same value to advertisers. I advertise on platforms ranging between $0.20/click to $1.50/click, and different platforms offer different value per click.
• stefan_kendall 13y ago
  This is an incredible idea, and it looks like you executed your design well, and even had the gusto to put school aside to go 100%. If anyone deserves to succeed, it's you man. I hope twitter comes around for you.
  • evan_ 13y ago
    Really? He just came up with a different way to spam people and you're wishing him well? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
    • papsosouid 13y ago
      This is HN. Anything is awesome as long as you quit school to make a startup out of it. People here would congratulate a startup selling people as slaves as long as their domain ended in .io or .ly
    • waylonflinn 13y ago
      I think that part of the problem here is a perspective created by the previous abuses of an activity. That activity is advertising. It isn't inherently bad to attempt to reach out to someone with something they might think is cool. The problem is, historically, the things advertisements show us suck. Because of this, we automatically associate attempts to connect a person with something they might be interested in to be bad if the attempt is initiated by the producer of the good or service. There are good reasons for this, but it it's still a generalization. Like all generalizations, it isn't always true. It might be the case that this service actually provides value to both parties: the person with the good or service initiating the activity and the person who is made aware of it. This is the definition of a win-win interaction. The only real way to determine the quality of this service is to try to measure whether value is being created on both sides.
      • evan_ 13y ago
        I was walking down the street and a guy was waving a sword around with his eyes closed. Before I could react, he thrust the sword deep into my chest. Through some miracle, he avoided every vital organ and, stuck to the end of the sword as it burst through the back of my ribcage, was a huge cancerous tumor. That guy saved my life! ^^^^ this COULD MAYBE happen. I still don't want people to stab me with a sword. I could MAYBE get spam that has something I want to buy. I still don't want to get spam. When someone fav's one of my tweets, I get a notification. I like this because it tells me that someone liked something I said. It makes me happy. This reduces the value of these notifications and, if it becomes widespread, will probably make me turn off notifications, which will make me sad. Don't you see how this is producing negative value?
• SurfScore 13y ago
  I don't like this trend with services being shut down by the big guys in the industry. You see what happened with AppGratis, and now this. I understand the whole TOS violation thing, but when a big company can shut down a successful startup just because they don't like what they're doing, it doesn't jive with that whole capitalism thing. Is there anything we can do about this, or is it just a product of building on someone else's platform? Obviously, this has happened throughout history, but on a much smaller scale. I can't recall something as prevalent and simply integral to most people's everyday lives as Twitter/Facebook/the App Store where this sort of heavy-handedness could happen. Even when Windows was in its prime, people could pretty much build anything they wanted for it (for better or for worse).
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • SoftwareMaven 13y ago
    It would surprise me if this was new. I bet this kind of thing has happened for as long as business has happened, but the owned-resource being built on was more likely real estate, whether it was some lord who could kick a peasant off his land or some industrialist who could shut down a shop owner in the town he built for his factory. If anything, we might be less susceptible to it now. It would make a fascinating study, anyway.
    • SurfScore 13y ago
      The thing is that the instead of it being real estate with maybe 1,000 tenants, its a service that has hundreds of millions of users. Facebook has over a billion. I don't know if anyone has had the power to shut off access to that many people before.
      • raylu 13y ago
        Yeah, but there's a big difference between shutting off my Twitter access and literally removing me from the land I live on.
  • 13y ago
• mrmaddog 13y ago
  Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search for existing precedents if you don't already have a decent knowledge of legalese.
  • A1kmm 13y ago
    Disclaimer: IANAL, talk to a lawyer if this is more than a hypothetical question. Under US law, the 9th circuit held in a criminal case that an employee who violates employer computer access policies with intent to defraud and by that action furthers the intended fraud and obtains something of value. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-10038/10-10038-2011-04-28.html http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-... The 1st Circuit held in a civil case found grounds to uphold an injunction against someone redistributing data obtained from a scraper on the grounds that scraping public data in the circumstances exceeded authorised access, and that the data was something of value that would harm the target website. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/58/608331/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/... I don't think these laws are a good thing, but the reality is that US courts have found that accessing websites for purposes beyond the terms of services with 'intent to defraud' violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Defrauding could potentially mean misleading people into following you on Twitter if having Twitter followers is valuable for marketing. The OP's post could be introduced as evidence by Twitter that he intended to exceed authorised access, that he had intent to defraud, and that he knew his actions were harming Twitter. I think the OP would be well advised to take legal advice on whether to shut down the site now and / or retract the blog post (although it might be too late to suppress it now, given how many people have seen it and possibly archived it).
• FramesPerSushi 13y ago
  That's interesting... http://i.imgur.com/Idie3In.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Idie3In.jpg
• R41p4t4ng 13y ago
  I agree
  • R41p4t4ng 13y ago
    Me too
    • R41p4t4ng 13y ago
      Whew! I thought I was the only one!
• abductee 13y ago
  you don't need more vms to get around their rate limit, you just need to query their api using a clientside language like javascript, that way the ip twitter gets is the ip of the user, not your servers. The company I work at has awesome search, so I have a tool which grabs tweets from individual user's streams (if a customer has an issue with my product and tweets about it I like to search their public twitter stream to see if they've mentioned us or our competitors lately). My script is a python one using httplib, but I realized that I could just as easily make these queries using jquery and send them anywhere I like. This moves the rate limit from your server's ip to the user's ip. If a bunch of people are using your product from the same office it could be a bit of an issue but you could probably detect that (with their 420 chill out code) and use one of your vms ips until that office's ip cools off again. That'd probably make your overhead quite a bit cheaper I'd imagine.
  • abductee 13y ago
    obviously the users would have to be logged in for this to work, which in your case might not be the desired use. Still, this could be an optimization step that could save you some cash down the road.
  • ec109695 13y ago
    What about cross domain restrictions?
• mseebach 13y ago
  There is another flaw in the business model: It feeds off the assumption that when someone favourites one of your tweets, it's because a person liked it, not a bot trolling for followers. I suspect the reason Twitter Ads is 20x more expensive for a follower is that it explicitly states that it's a "promoted tweet" and that throws up all kinds of guards. Once that cat is out of the bag, the cost to acquire a follower using the favourite-method is going to go up.
  • benatkin 13y ago
    I think the fact that it remains in the mentions pane has more of an effect than people being turned off because it says "promoted tweet".
  • MartinCron 13y ago
    Another commons, another tragedy. Sigh.
  • anthonys 13y ago
    I don't know what % of Twitter users i'd be bucketed with for this comment but I think Twitter "Promoted Tweets" are probably the ad I most prefer to view. I'd hesitate a guess at how many i've clicked on (Probably 20%) but they have always been the most relevant to what I am interested in at a given time, compared to re-targeting/ad-words which aren't necessarily relevant to what I am interested in but are more point-in-time associated. Presumably Twitter achieve this based on stats like who I follow (including who i've followed recently) and i'd guess search activity etc. but hey, works for me.
• adventured 13y ago
  The problem with the approach of wanting to get caught, is the assumption that Twitter is going to care whether your approach is superior to their Twitter Ads approach. They will not care, judging by their past history. They'll most likely shut you down and go about their business with Twitter Ads. These days Twitter is an extraordinarily rigid company when it comes to anything outside their borders.
  • Odin9 13y ago
    He knows he will be shut down with or without this blog post. Twitter already knows about him. The purpose of this blog post is to save what little of his reputation is left by making it seem like he's redeeming himself. He isn't. He's waiting for Twitter to shut him down while he keeps making money as a spammer.
• tehwebguy 13y ago
  This is cool! An option that is probably more likely to be API TOS friendly is to show the user relevant tweets and suggest that they favorite, rather than auto-favoriting them.
• unreal37 13y ago
  This business model isn't analogous to "promoted tweets" or "Twitter ads". It's analogous to "email spam". You're a spammer essentially. Using an automated bot to fake a human interaction (favorite) in order to get my attention and get me to follow you. It doesn't matter that it's more effective than "Twitter Ads". Twitter Ads are marked as Ads, your favorites are not. I really do hope Twitter shuts you down, as well as those follow bots that follow me 10 times a day and unfollow me the next day. Sadly, Twitter doesn't do much to combat spam so they likely will not. But don't fool yourself into thinking you are going to partner or be acquired by Twitter.
  • scrabble 13y ago
    I disagree. These are people who are following accounts because the accounts favorite a tweet of theirs. If you follow someone without looking into their profile and deciding if you are interested in their content then you get what you deserve.
    • unreal37 13y ago
      Just as if you click a link in an email without understanding who it's really from, you get what you deserve. So, spam works. It still doesn't make it morally right to trick people into following you.
    • AznHisoka 13y ago
      So by your logic, you have no problem with email spammers because the people who fall for their spam get what they deserve?
      • khafra 13y ago
        Not quite. Following people is always opt-in.
        • richardwhiuk 13y ago
          So is clicking on an email link.
• biznickman 13y ago
  I'm confused. Why would someone who's running a profitable business, that works, expose their techniques at the risk of killing the business? You know it may be shut down at some point, so print cash until that point arrives. Not sure why someone would sabotage their own business this way. Is the appeal of recognition that significant?
  • mrilhan 13y ago
    Short term: wants a meeting, and this should probably do the trick. Long term: doesn't want get killed, prefers to partner with Twitter and sustain a lesser profit margin for a longer period of time. I say a slow clap is in order here, no matter what his true intentions are, only if for being so focused on what he wants from Twitter Inc.
    • jacquesm 13y ago
      Short term: probably will get killed.
    • AznHisoka 13y ago
      The chances of him partnering with Twitter are close to nil. This is a very dumb move by his part that will probably lead to a loss of income for the next few years.
      • nchlswu 13y ago
        I'd guess that he's 100% prepared for this and has weighed the risks. I'm making a big presumption about his intelligence though.
    • scarmig 13y ago
      Almost certainly will be nuked before the end of week, perhaps by end of day. There goes $50/month/customer, for someone with supposedly hundreds of customers. He probably could have gotten at least a couple months more without being shut down and some free publicity on Hacker News afterwards complaining about being shut down, but he traded that for a maybe 1% chance at some kind of introduction. And, I guess, a HN post in a couple hours complaining about being ingloriously shuttered.
• jonsterling 13y ago
  You're a bad citizen, mate. Not of Twitter, but of the Internet. The things you are doing are helpful to shitty people who want to get followers artificially, and obnoxious to good people.
  • WiseWeasel 13y ago
    No, if he were a bad citizen, he wouldn't have written this post. He's a morally ambiguous citizen at worst. He's drawing attention to this kind of abuse, so maybe Twitter will do something about it before it starts pissing everyone off and driving them away from the service.
    • jonsterling 13y ago
      No, it's an obvious plea for attention. He wants to get bought or hired; or perhaps he wants to trade in his business for notoriety. Obnoxious either way.
• amanvir_sangha 13y ago
  Interesting read, but I'm kinda confused. Some questions: - Why does the application have to be web based? Why don't you build a desktop application where the user has to use their own API key? This will also help bypass the IP limit. - Aren't you already breaking their terms? [1] "Using [third party applications to “Get More Followers Fast!”] is not allowed according to the Twitter Rules." - How many favorites can an account do every day? Is it unlimited? [1] https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-a...
  • lucaspiller 13y ago
    I think the difference with this is he isn't following users, he is getting users to follow him.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jacquesm 13y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
• phpdude1912 13y ago
  Having signed up myself out of curiosity, I can't actually find any method of paying for the service, which I find strange as you mention you're making a lot of money from this venture. For me, it just sounds like this project is merely a throwaway project and the aim is to get banned, at least then to get onto the Ads API where they may have another concept, but couldn't get on it any other way. Might be me, might just be extra dubious, but it doesn't look right to me.
  • jsleuth 13y ago
    The whole story smacks of a PR stunt to me. My guess is he's really looking for a job. Or testing the hack-ability of ycombinator (and non-researched news aggregators in general).
• bradleyjoyce 13y ago
  I'm (somewhat) surprised by the lashing out and negativity towards the service in many of the comments. Any product or service can be used for evil by evil people. I've used Myles' service. It works amazingly well. So well, in fact, we looked at using his API to integrate the functionality into Socialyzer. We ended up not coming to terms and we built some scripts to do this for ourselves internally. We use this functionality to build a very targeted following of people who may find our service (http://www.rewardrkt.com http://www.rewardrkt.com) useful . Our conversation rates from favorite, to follow, to registration on our site are extremely high. The people we auto-favorite are finding value in what we offer. Favoriting their tweets is an efficient way to "introduce" yourself to someone without being super pushy. After Twitter shutting down Flattr I reached out to Myles again to see if he'd seen the news. Of course he had, and I see his blog post as a bold move. Why wait around for doomsday if you can either (1) make it go away or (2) bring it about faster and move on to the next thing afterward.
  • Caligula 13y ago
    So you spam favorite twitter too? You know you are breaking twitters tos just like the op and degrading the value of twitter the same way an email spammer degrades email?
    • bradleyjoyce 13y ago
      De-valuing it for whom, exactly? Given the number of people who are following us back and registering for a service that is extremely relevant/important to them, it's hard to see how there is any degradation of value for anyone involved. In fact, they are gaining value out of it.
      • MartinCron 13y ago
        That sounds exactly like the rationalization any spammer would make. After all, some people want an online pharmacy, right?
        • 13y ago
• bengrunfeld 13y ago
  As the saying goes, "Where there's profit, there's a way". If you feel that being in breach of Twitter's terms of service will get you shut down, you need to devote everything you've got to finding a solution where they don't can you, but you keep your revenue model. Maybe it's hard to hear, but I'd suggest trying harder to get a meeting with them, or hiring someone as a go-between to set up a meeting. Also, a technique that a friend taught me is to connect with the person below your actual target in the company, and build a relationship with them. Then they will help you set up a meeting with the person you actually need to talk to. (btw, they call this the Cheerleader tactic.) Good luck!
• orangethirty 13y ago
  Yeah, this sort of thing isn't new. You just never hear about it due to how well it works. The OP has actually made a lot of people angry by making this public (not me, though). There are other ways to game these platforms. Twitter is actually quite susceptible in other ways (not telling). Anyhow, next time be smart about posting stuff like this. There are quite a lot of bad people gaming these platforms. A mistake and you could be on the cross hairs of a botnet.
• arbuge 13y ago
  I'm guessing they'll move fast to do exactly that now that you've waved the red rag in their face. This part won't make them any happier: >> I started renting a large cluster of virtual machines to scale the service while staying within Twitter's 'per IP address' rate limits.
• Myrth 13y ago
  Shameless plug. One of the ways to start thwarting this spammy behavior is counter-network of twitter accounts, randomly inter-followed for further legitimacy. Once a follower is identified as a spam, it's being mass followed. It would skew conversion rates and perhaps force clients to pay for fake followers, which they won't appreciate.
• bluepill 13y ago
  Even though, Im not a fan of your "spam" approach (and the fact that you're still a kid taking people for total idiots) I must admit the idea and especially what it lead to is a success, at least for you. My opinion, is that ads suck, most of them do (except the ones that make you laugh and remain classics which in that case fall into another category, and as far as I'm concerned that only happened with TV commercials and a very few "internet" ones) ... and being spammed even though it's becoming a habbit with all the interwebs bullshit we've been and have to digest everyday is more than annoying. You seem to be smart and you should definetly put your talent in something else.
• dkd903 13y ago
  Arent you the guy who deleted some production database at work?
• tanepiper 13y ago
  There is another company that does this - I forget it's name, but they didn't explain what they did - just that they had a model to 'find quality followers' Quickly I got sick of the number of favourites it did - it was really spammy. I am not a fan of this model.
• lnanek2 13y ago
  This isn't really anything new. Countless people and companies do follows, favorites, etc. just to send that notification and get some eyeballs. Props to him for automating it and monetizing it, though.
  • greyman 13y ago
    Countless people and companies do emailing others to send them something. If you automate and monetize it, it is a spamming.
• futhey 13y ago
  This is part of the reason I stopped using twitter and haven't looked back. It detracts from the overall UX.
• gavinlynch 13y ago
  I'm not quite sure I understand the point of this post. If you see spamming as an amoral activity, either shut it down yourself, or continue knowing that you are profiting from amoral activity. If you don't, then please continue spamming. I think that would make you a pretty big a-hole, but it's your life. shrugs
• hkmurakami 13y ago
  Why do I feel like this is thinly veiled way of saying "Twitter should acquire me / hire me"?
• swanson 13y ago
  So I tried out the service (followgen.com) today - targeting "#ruby", "software craftsmanship", "hacker news" and "software near MY_GEO_IP_THING" - because I was curious. It would be nice to have a bit more exposure to developers for things like technical blog posts and new projects, so why not? It favorite'd several hundred tweets for me today (btw twitter makes it very hard to mass unfavorite, I had to write a bit of javascript). I got one new follower: a recruiter. Given the sub-one percent "conversion rate", I turned it off. I'm not sure if I picked bad targets, or if more technical users are less likely to "follow-back". But, those were my results, do with them what you will! edit: I'll add there were quite a few "misfires" that led me to favorite some rather strange tweets - particularly #ruby which I favorited several tweets about people's young children or pets named Ruby.
• dsjoerg 13y ago
  Agreed, twitter should shut you down.
• idrisser 13y ago
  What grade did your professor give you for this project? Wasn't there any other interesting behaviour changing project from your class?
• anonymole 13y ago
  Make as much $ from this effort and move on. Who gives a shit about what Twitter does or does not do. It's all just blather and nonsense anyway. If Twitter was shutdown tomorrow - would anyone care - hell no.
• icedchai 13y ago
  So specifically what "Terms of Service" is he violating? I looked through it and couldn't find anything specific that addresses automated "favoriting". There was some vague stuff about spam.
• gotonic 13y ago
  Brilliant PR. Lead the sheeple on.
• dannielo2 13y ago
  I don't get email notifications if someone I don't follow favorites me.
• ComputerScience 13y ago
  The "plea for public support" blog post is getting old and frankly immature. You knew Twitter's TOS & you broke them. That's okay if you're willing to put up with the business risk that--if you gain scale--Twitter may be forced to buy you (eBay/Paypal, Photobucket/Myspace) or at least work with you. That said, your service as others acknowledge below is akin to spamming. This is not a service that is for the betterment of Twitter users AND advertisers. It merely betters your company's coiffeurs and advertisers who are getting "a deal." You want to win Twitter over? Make it painfully obvious to customers what is occurring. Disclose your business metrics. Put out case studies that show how both users AND advertisers benefit. The appeal for public support/disclosure is old hat.