No More Gaming Twitter June 20th, 2009
And who said that there was no first mover advantage? Any Twitter user out there, up until now, could happily game Twitter, by following massive numbers of people, and then unfollowing the ones that did not follow back. No more. SocialToo asshole, Jesse Stay received an email from Twitter support saying that: ” [people who] use software to constantly churn followers in a repeated pattern of following and unfollowing will … risk suspension.”
Sea change.
Back when Twitter was new and the world was fresh, there were no following limits at all. In fact, I forget his name, but there is one man who follows 78,000 people, and only have 24,000 followers. Different times. Now, Twitter is trying to put a little law into their wild west.
This means that overuse and abuse of the system will result in the nuclear option, suspension. Especially if you have a premium account name, this is terrifying.
All in all, a congragulations to Twitter. This will assist to making the whole system more honest. This will hurt spammers. This will make the system easiar to understand for new users. This will take a bite out of the omg-get-more-followers-now cottage industry, but that only hurts those abusing the system.
This is a small step, but an important one.
Posted in Web/Tech | Comments (1)
June 20th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Good article. The one problem with all this ’shutting down’ is the following: I went to a digital media conference last week. I launched Tweetdeck. I wanted to follow 50 people who were Tweeting at the conference. After about the first 10 I was not allowed to follow any more. Sad. Friendfeed next time I guess.