Over the last 18 months or so, Twitter has become a powerful player in the realm of social-networking/time-wasting websites out there. For those unfamiliar, people can go on and post a message of 140 characters or less, and that message will show up on the home page of anyone who is "following" them. Messages can be what you did that day, what you are currently doing, a video you found, a quote, really anything you want.
Since joining Twitter, one thing that seems strange is the presence of spammers. These people follow as many random people as possible. Not random people like celebrities. Just random people they do not even know. I can't really wrap my head around this. Why would random dude across the country want to be told that I "just took a chance on those expired fig newtons..." I don't even always want to know when my actual friends eat recently expired food. So here's two possible explanations.
1) They want to feel like they have a lot of friends. This is entirely likely. I think once you get to a certain point, the more people you follow on twitter has a negative correlation with the number of people you actually know.
2) They think that because they follow lots of people, some of those people will follow them. This has a little bit of sense I suppose, but experience shows me its not likely. Whenever someone new follows me on Twitter, i get an email about it which shows how many people they follow, and how many people follow THEM. Listen, Mr. Spammer, when you are following 39,701 people, and you have 8 followers, I don't think your plan is working.
At any rate, I don't see the point of Twitter spamming. Maybe there is something I am missing, I dunno. Welcome back to Richmond everyone, and good luck with the first day.
No comments:
Post a Comment