We get pitches from people all the time to review their products on our blog, or add their affiliate link. What’s consistently obvious in all of them is that the person doing the pitch has never actually read our blog.

Still, they keep pouring in. We used to just delete them unanswered. But, where’s the fun in that? We decided it was high time we repaid the courtesy. If they take the time to scrape our email address and send a form letter, we ought to take a moment to reply.

Jeremy Kates, from Web2Carz.com, wrote:

Hi Blog Owner,

I was looking over your blog, and I think you would greatly benefit from our FREE used car search sidebar widget for WordPress. The search results are embedded inline on your sidebar (AJAX) without sending the user away. In addition, you can become an affiliate and earn extra money for any auto loan referrals.

Obviously they’ve read all the comments on our blog where people are saying, “Hey, I like your blog, but where are the used car ads? Every blog is better with used car ads! Bring them on!”

His email goes on about how they pay a whopping $4 per lead, which is awesome, since cars cost thousands of dollars, so naturally, $4 is a huge commission. He even says, If nothing else, it offers another way to siphon some revenue from visitors on their way out. That’s the ticket. “As long as you’re leaving anyway, wanna buy a car?” Here’s Jeremy’s email

Here’s our reply.

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks again for thinking of me!
Fail Bird Handler
Twitter-Fail.com

One time, a jillion years ago, FBH was toiling away on a pressing deadline by watching traffic go by outside her window. As a particularly dilapidated junker came into view, there was a loud PING! and then a CLUNK! followed by an amazing assortment of engine parts spewing onto the street below the vehicle, which thudded to a stop half a block away. It was awesome.

When bots go bad, they trail bits and bobs behind them, too. Like all these tweets:

What is “<![CDATA?” It’s code that indicates what follows is real text, and not computer code. When the program does things correctly, you don’t see “<![CDATA“, but you do see what comes next. Problem is, some bots are just not qualified for the job, and make a mess of things. When people depend on robots to post to their twitter stream, they run the risk of looking like the unsocial, auto-posting, misanthropic opportunists they really are. Not that we judge, or anything.

You probably think we hate this. Au contraire, mon frère! This is an awesome thing. When we see someone dropping code in our twitter stream, there’s no question about whether or not they’re a real person. We don’t have to wonder if they’re going to interact, or play well with others. Their bot can’t even finish a sentence, so there’s no chance they will ever show up to see what’s going on in their stream. Which would be a good idea, by the way. But that would mean they actually care.

These bot-driven twitter accounts make the decision to block them as easy as the slut at the corner bar who will sleep with any guy sporting a wedding band (Hi Marcia!). And unlike the slut, we have standards. We like to talk to real people. The kind who sometimes like to talk to us, as well. So we’ll block without a second thought, and let someone else deal with the mess.

Hello? Twitter? Clean up on aisle @amaznbargains, and @_EDconsulting, and @Iwilliam045… heck, just keep the mop out, this mess is everywhere.

It seems like everyone has their own army these days. @thebloggess has an army. They formed after @WilliamShatner blocked her (the nerve!) and continue to do good works in her name. @craigyferg has his own Robot Skeleton Army, which may or may not really do anything, but have given him his lovely sidekick Geoff Peterson. Even @JustinBieber has an army. Heck, he even has his own Navy. Clearly a navy where no one has to ask or tell.

We don’t have any army. But we want one. We aren’t delusional enough to believe we’d get a spit and polish, precision-team of highly trained militia. Ours would be more like the Confederate army. They didn’t have the training or the pretty uniforms, had to provide their own weapons, and as we recall, actually lost the war, but those guys had heart.

What we do have are followers with whom we get to interact on occasion. Every now and then, they send us fails they found in the nooks and crannies of twitter. So, instead of an army, we have our own little band of spies. Now that we think about it, a covert group of spies is way cooler than an army.

When one of our undercover pals sends us something worth sharing, we bestow upon them the coveted, fleeting honor of Honorary Fail Bird Handler.

In the category of “Worst twitter spammer,” Honorary Fail Bird Handler (anonymous) shared this gem this week:

We’re guessing @mlmsexmoney678 heard that if you use the right keywords (and what is more popular than mlm bussiness sexyspot money?) people will flock to your stream to buy what you have to sell. We suppose anyone can buy a free iphone, but, would they? If so, @mlmsexmoney678 is onto something good.

In an email titled, “You’ll never know who is reading,” @codem sent us this lovely conversation, which starts out with an average, ho-hum, made it all the way around the twitterverse and back, retweeted retweet:

Followed, not surprisingly, by a snarky reply

Lo and behold, somebody at GFI was sitting with bated breath at his keyboard, repeatedly hitting F5 on their twitter search so they could jump in with their hand extended like a used-car salesman trying to hit his quota.

We can’t hold it against @GFISoftware for living up to their potential. Geeks are expected to be socially awkward.

Now we’d like to introduce you to @EJWalle, today’s queen of cluelessness. Alert Honorary Fail Bird Handler @SmurfGalak brought her to our attention. It’s a long story. Let us sum up.

Here’s the skinny: @EJWalle followed @SmurfGalak. @SmurfGalak followed back, even though @EJWalle had some spammy tweets. She should have known better.

In other words, “I don’t care one whit* who I follow, I’m not looking to make actual friends or anything.”

Things don’t go quite the way @EJWalle planned:

So, @SmurfGalak offers an explanation

and is promptly unfollowed. Goes to show some people just don’t appreciate good help.

Ever the slow-learner, @EJWalle complains again about the monster she created.

But the poor thing just can’t stop. Hooked on the bot bug, she continues her death spiral:

There’s clearly no hope for @EJWalle or @mlmsexmoney678, and there’s plenty where they came from. If you’d like to become an Honorary Fail Bird Handler and learn the secret handshake, send screenshots and/or urls of the funny, silly, really bad, or awesome fails you find to tweetfail@gmail.com or DM us on twitter.

This post will self-destruct in 30 seconds….

—–

*4 whits = 1 iota.
8 iotas = a rat’s ass.
16 rats asses = a damn.

The only things more prolific than tribbles are spammers and bots on twitter. We have to hurry and write this post, because if we keep trying to find all the accounts belonging to GP Schaefer, we’ll never finish. Every time we do another search just to make sure we have them all, we find another one.

So far, we have: @CougarMtnSw_OE @bMobileTech @CougarMtn24x7 @CougarMtnGuru @OutgrowingQB @BusinessListsUS @Business_Lists @acctg2000 @CougarMtnSW_IN @phonesuport @ReportWriter @PDFBlaster @CougarMTNSW @eMailLists @Peachtreesw @LivewarePub @quickbookssw @SWoutfitters @crystalguru @COUGARMTN @MyController @CMStotheMAX

Flushing out all these dupes was so easy, we almost feel sorry for ol’ GP. Kind of like hunters in (insert whichever US state you think is most hillbilly) who drive through the fields shooting from the open window of their Ford F150, it wasn’t even sporting. Opening all the accounts in the same name was the big tip-off. The clincher was both the retweets from one account to the next, and the following lists. GP likes to follow himself around. You can’t get lonely when me, myself and I = 22.

Of course, GP could have saved himself the trouble, and spent his time creating one twitter account and making a few friends.  Wait – who are we kidding? With all the twitter crap apps around, it takes no time at all to create a bunch of accounts and have them follow each other, or a bunch of random people. The crap apps will also generate your tweets for you, so you never have to actually use twitter in the way it was intended. Since twitter is free, why should anyone care how many resources they waste?

Because it isn’t going to be free forever, buddy. Somebody has to pay the bills.

Twitter already shows little, unobtrusive ads, and it won’t end there. Eventually, they will have to get serious about monetizing. All those jerks who are wasting twitters resources will make that happen sooner, rather than later.

Something we learned from Star Trek: Little problems grow into big problems.

Another thing we learned from Star Trek:  A virus in their food supply killed the tribbles. Just saying.

(that was a joke. an attempt at humor. jeez.)

…there is only follow and not follow. Even so, there are people who just can’t make up their mind.

When both Thubten Comerford and Chris Husong followed us again, we thought we’d check and see who else couldn’t commit to following us full-time. We found lots of two-timers, hat tricks, quartets and quintuples (okay, what would you call them??) so we thought we’d just give you a lineup of the ones who are the most prolific in the follow/unfollow/refollow game.

@ericleebow starts off our list with 7 follows, and is joined by @mcfixit:

Slightly more ambitious: @BstTwt, and @pattishock have each followed us 8 times. Perhaps decision-making isn’t their strong suit.

The highest achievement award for #followerwhoring goes to @SteveKayser, who makes all the other contenders look like slackers by following us a total of 15 times.

Why would people waste their time following and unfollowing so much? Don’t be silly, they aren’t doing it themselves. They have a bot doing the heavy lifting for them. If you check the twitter page of each of these users, you’ll see they either follow and are followed by a ton of people, or have lots more followers than they are following. The use the bot to follow people just so they can grow their follower numbers when those people auto-follow them back. And when people don’t follow them, they unfollow and move on to the next sucker. But these bots are pretty stupid, like some people we know (Hi Marcia!), so they end up following a bunch of people again and again because they can’t remember where they’ve been.

This is a popular activity for “social media experts/strategists/mavericks/consultants/marketer/gurus” because big numbers of followers gives the appearance of influence and authority to people who don’t know any better.

It’s much easier for these posers to use a robot to get mindless followers who don’t care what they have to say than to suffer under the weight of actually being interesting and providing valuable content. The end result is no different than whispering to a packed auditorium. A few people may hear what you have to say. The rest won’t even notice you’re on the stage.

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