At first I wasn’t too bothered, but for me this is getting as annoying as spam. A few people have noted how many Twitter users appear to add thousands of friends for absolutely no reason.
Every time someone adds me as a friend, Twitter sends me an email. I then have to login to Gmail, read the email, click on the link to work out who the hell this stranger is before finding out that they have 12,684 friends compared with just 2,207 followers. I mean, 2,207 is a lot compared to my 42, but this person’s friends/followers ratio (5.7 compared to my 0.8) is shows him up a bit.
This is probably the tenth time this has happened to me, and as I said above it is a fairly common complaint among other Twitter users. I do not know these people and they appear to say nothing of interest and. To be honest, I find it weird that these people would want to add me as a friend on Twitter.
I will not block them. I do not intend to hide away my Twitter feed. If somebody wants to read it (although I doubt this), then that is fair enough.
But here is my request to those Twitter friend whores: Please, just give it a rest. It is just wasting my time and yours. You don’t have to be friends with everyone in the world.
Calum Leslie
18 June 2007 08:53
#1
Maybe they’re waiting for the first vulnerability to bear down on the service. Apparently a lot of bots join phpBB forums so that they don’t need to worry about the tedious signing-up process when the next vulnerability comes around.
matthew
18 June 2007 09:30
#2
Ive noticed this too. Im not sure its anything to do with possible future vulnerabilities as the ones Ive had follow me do seem to be active and ‘proper’ accounts, they just have loads of friends. My guess is an attempt to get to or stay at the top of one or more of those Twitter stats sites.
Rhys
18 June 2007 10:15
#3
I’m getting a bunch of people add me to Facebook I have no idea. But I think these are real people, not like with Twitter which could easily be spam
MatGB
18 June 2007 12:39
#4
It’s a reason I hate MySpace, far too many spambots add me, or real people using spambots.
Thing is of course Duncan; you promote your twitter heavily here and other places, so if it’s telling you when you get a new reader then that shouldn’t really surprise you. On every ‘network’ style site there will be those who think having a gazillion friends makes them more important.
What they forget is that numbers != reach, more important to be read by a small number of intelligent influencers within the network than it is to be scanned by a large number of other idiots. The word’ll get out much better if there is something worth saying.
doctorvee
18 June 2007 21:01
#5
It is not spammers in the sense of, “I am a bot here to sell you meds.” It is seemingly real people with active accounts sending real messages. They just feel the need to add thousands and thousands of friends. MySpace and others are the same really, but you need to be accepted before you become a friend on most sites. On Twitter it is much easier to befriend somebody, because the other person doesn’t have to confirm it!
lady macleod
18 June 2007 23:10
#6
good to know.
Richard Havers
24 June 2007 07:53
#7
I predict the end of Twitter.
Frungi
26 June 2007 01:15
#8
On MySpace, it’s usually, “I am a bot here to sell you ‘free’ webcam boobs.”