twitter fail blog

When twitter introduced lists on October 16, 2009 (relax, there will not be a test) to “make it easier to curate tweets into meaningful real-time experiences” people jumped right on board, creating lists of their favorite friends, funny people, or (ugh) celebrities, so they no longer had to slog through their timeline to find the stuff they really want to read.

Of course, like every good thing that comes along, this gave spammers and followerwhores new ways to game the system and polish the illusion of popularity they crave. It’s no shocker that the number of lists you are on is just as insignificant as the number of people following you.

“What?” You say, “lists are valuable tools that show just how many people truly love us!!” To which we respond, Pish Tosh.

Let’s start with @osen, shall we? With only 33 tweets, they managed to game their numbers to get over 9000 followers. With twitter’s following limits, it appears that they lost at least 20,000 followers, but still managed to get on 40 lists, even though they didn’t tweet for almost an entire year.

@H_H_H, who is not the Triple H of WWE fame, has put the least effort into maintaining his account, with 2 tweets in March 2009, yet 1476 misguided “fans” are following his silence, and added him to 22 lists.

@AloeTropical is into the twitter numbers game prime time. With a total of 32 tweets, they’ve manipulated their way to nearly 25,000 followers. Who wouldn’t follow to get such valuable information as “Happy Tweeting!” “Happy Thanksgiving” and “zzzzzzzzzGood Morning.” They only tweeted 6 times since twitter lists were introduced, yet still manage to get on 119 lists.

Then there’s @ProfessorGAcom, who, although he claims “slow and steady wins the race,” rocketed to the 2000 following limit in just 9 days, amassing a total of 23 lists, for the minimal effort of posting just 11 tweets.

The star of the show, for fully harnessing the power of twitter lists is @n2mtweets, who, on one single day posted a total of 14 tweets about his twitter lists (and nothing else) and has managed to get listed 73 times.

Since twitter doesn’t limit the number of accounts one person can have, it’s easy for superficial people who want to appear popular (Hi Marcia!) to create a bunch of accounts so they can put themselves on a bunch of lists, in the same way that they can create a bunch of accounts so they can follow and retweet themselves.

Not all lists are created by friends and fans, so the numbers are also inflated by those of us who use some of our lists for other purposes: To send a message about the bad guys, gamers and idiots we are definitely not following.

If your head is inflated from the number of lists in your stats, consider the following:
@Keeping_It_Real/get-more-followers-douche
@AmericanLady49/SCUMBAGDemocratsontwitter
@AmericanLady49/braindeadsickpeople
@richrecruiter/spammers
@tweet_fail/bots-to-block

There’s a lot more where those came from. You can search http://listorious.com to find more of the same, as well as some lists you might want to follow, IF you find them interesting.

In a perfect world, the number of followers you have, and the lists you are on, would mean that you have friends and fans, reach and influence. On twitter, it just means you know how to play the game. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again (and most likely, again and again, and again) the numbers really mean nothing, if no one is listening.

Send in the Twitter Fail Bird! Tell these tweeps you saw them on Twitter Fail