twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
Just Ducky
The Fail Bird Handler has a broken wing. Actually, she just had right rotator cuff and bicep repair, which doesn’t fit the theme of this blog, so we’ll stick with “broken wing.” That is why postings have been sporadic of late. Hopefully, this will also explain any typos that get past the editing process, because we are using Dragon software to dictate, and it doesn’t understand us completely. But then, no one really does.
Our good friend @stinginthetail sent us a helpful alert :
So, naturally, we had to take a look.
We are always amazed, well actually more like amused, when spammers, scammers, and schemers get so offended when they’re called out. Of course, we take exception to the term “follower-chasing”and call it what it really is: “follower-whoring”, which is a delightful term coined by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @Bytor back in August.
The most valuable followers on twitter are earned by posting good content and interacting with your tweeps. Buying friends on twitter has the value of a one night stand. By doing so, you show that you don’t care who they are, and certainly don’t want to develop a relationship with them. You just want a connection, if only for a day.
@AlanDB92 may be a perfectly nice, honest, friendly tweep. However, his quacks and waddles make us think otherwise.
We’re heading back into the land of Vicodin and Benadryl, which on this Thanksgiving Day makes us very thankful.
Not Touching You
Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm! Make him stop!
Spammy, give your sister a break, would you?
But Mom, I’m not going anything! I’m not even touching her. I’m just sitting here minding my own business.
Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm!
Just ignore him. If you don’t pay attention, he’ll stop.
That’s kind of the way it is with spammers on twitter. Some people don’t get that, though, and have an aneurysm every time one of these losers follows them.
It’s easy to waste a lot of time and energy checking out followers and blocking the ones you don’t want to follow back, but here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything. You can just leave them there, gathering spam dust, and eventually, they’ll drop off. Having them follow you costs you nothing, and doesn’t change the value of the tweets you read, because if you’re not following them you won’t see their tweets and won’t be tempted to buy anything.
Make it harder, and spammers will get smarter. It’s the natural evolutionary process of spam. Twitter spam started by slithering along its belly in DMs, dragged its knuckles into the public timeline, and now stands upright while abusing hashtags and trending topics. Give spammers a captcha and double opt-in, and they’ll just write a little program during their break from emailing 419 letters to take care of the whole thing.
You tell ‘em. Except, if they’re blocked, you won’t really, because they won’t see this tweet. Not that it would matter, since their motto is “so much spam, so many people to spam.” No one said they were creative.
If you’re only going to interact with people you already know, you can IM, text, email, or call them. The beauty of twitter is meeting new people, learning new things, sharing new ideas. It doesn’t happen if you don’t let someone new into the mix.
Yup, this is that social networking thing that twitter is all about. Having no followers, and no one to talk to. If you have no followers, no one will care to read your tweets, because they won’t see them.
We hate spam. We hate spammers even more. Every spammer, every spammy tweet and DM wastes bandwidth, which overloads twitters servers and sends in the Fail Whale, or returns a 503 error, or just causes a blank page when we try to check the stream. We hate that.
Hopefully, as twitter grows an evolves, they will find ways to stem the tide of spam. Until then, since we can’t send a jolt of electricity through the intartubes to electrocute each one of them as they talk about their new Kindle or cash gifting scam, we’ll just keep ignoring them and spend our time and energy exchanging ideas with our buds. Like how to make that electrocution thing work.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
Sometimes there is a topic so rich and full of potential that we wax nostalgic about the early years of Saturday Night Life. Weekend Update with Chevy Chase would put Michael Jackson’s death in the proper context, and provide a refreshing counterpoint to the drivel that continues long after he was planted at Forest Lawn.
Michael took talent, fame, and privilege gained through the hard work of his entire family, and squandered it, in a self-indulgent spiral of self-mutilion and drug abuse, becoming a character more frightening and comical than Mr. Jefferson on South Park. His fame bought him access to children, and a free ride in a court of law. Not Guilty is a legal term. It doesn’t mean he was innocent. Is there an intelligent adult alive who really believes his dealings with children were all sunshine and rainbows?
Yesterday’s day long homage to him, by red-eyed, runny-nosed celebrities who shunned him for years was Hollywood window-dressing. We can only imagine how busy the phones were as all the agents in Tinsel Town fought to get their chosen celebrity an opportunity to march in the Michael Parade.
It’s refreshing, then, amidst all the MJ worship on twitter, to find someone engaging in hashtag spam in order to exploit the death of the King of Pop for his own personal gain. It’s the kind of crass disrespect ole Mikey deserves.
Of course, we kid. We think spamming hashtags shows what an enormous jerk one person can be.
True to form of the average twitter scammer, “Joseph Young” got down to business and set up a bunch of clones to spread his spam to the maximum number of tweets. He’s hoping you don’t remember the first rule of online avatars: If the chick is hot, she’s most likely not… A: hot, or B: a chick. Since they all point to his page, we’re pretty darned sure they are all him. (By the way, FBH says he’s not hot, either).
Then, “Joseph” and all his beauties started tweeting gems like this:
Bit.ly disabled that link, so he’s switched over to tinyurl.com today. Who wouldn’t want to “How to tweet spam would not be banned?” or “Juse set it up and forgrt it!”
He attempted yesterday to get a bunch of followers by offering his videos only to people who were following him, but that trick failed when his following verification tool didn’t work. So he “fixed” it. (PDF from yesterday)
Clicking through to his page today, you’ll see he’s offering to give you his piece of crap Twit Goldmine Exploiter - a collection of 6 videos showing you how to make money everyday automatically! That’s not all - it’s FREE until July 31, when he’s going to start selling it for $79, so act now!
Now we’ll tell you what we discovered so you don’t have to waste your time. The FREE program you get by just filling in your name and email address, requires you on the next screen to fill in your c0mplete address, phone number, and date of birth, and shares the terms of the FREE offer:
This promotion is conducted exclusively by Hotgiftzone. To receive the gift for this promotion you must: 1) register with valid information; 2) complete the user survey; 3) complete at least 2 Silver, 2 Gold and 6 Platinum offers. Available offers will vary and some offers may require a purchase to qualify. Receipt of your item requires compliance with offer terms, including: age and residency requirements, registration with valid email address, shipping address and contact phone number, completion of user survey and sponsor promotions. Upon valid completion of all Program Requirements we will ship your item to the shipping address you provided. Unless otherwise indicated, participation eligibility is restricted to US residents, 18 and over. Void where prohibited.
Of course, his page (on a free host) is poorly coded, so you can’t really see all of that information. Since this means you can’t sign up for anything, he is just as pitiful as the dead man from whom he is attempting to profit. The irony is priceless.
Wikipedia is our bible:
Excuse Me
We love irony. And not in the Alanis Morissette way, but true irony like this. Note today’s date: June 18. We’re wondering why @getfollowed7 doesn’t have 1600 followers, or @getfollowed8 doesn’t have 2000 people following them. Or why getfollowers 1-6 also haven’t hit their marks. We’re probably silly for this, but we think that people who guarantee you a certain number of followers should be able to hit those same numbers themselves.
Someone commented the other day that posting things like this just sends people their way. We doubt that any of our intelligent followers would use a scheme like this to raise their numbers. And, since we don’t follow anyone who is lame enough to join a twitter train, in our world, they don’t exist.
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