The Internet is a wondrous place where we can connect with people from all over the world as easy as our neighbour next door, or some would say more easily. Tools like email, instant messaging, blogs, podcasts and social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and the subject of this post: Twitter.
Twitter’s ability to instantly broadcast a message to dozens or hundreds of your closest friends makes it an ideal tool for sharing information with those who are interested in what you have to say. In recent months it has also become the domain of Internet marketers searching for another channel to hock their wares. Some do it simply, organically by browsing Twitter for people who may be interested in their product or service. This method I don’t have a problem with. There are others who would use automated services or bots to handle this process and this is where it starts to bother me. Enter Tweet Tornado.
The Software is the Problem
This is the kind of product that may not be illegal, but certainly goes against the spirit of the Terms of Service of sites like Twitter. In fact it enables people to explicitly break terms 4, 7 & 8 of Twitter’s ToS. Tweet Tornado’s creator(s) have created software which allows people to create an unlimited number of tweet-spam accounts that can be used to spam innocent Twitterers with that company’s product or service.
On Tweet Tornado’s site the how-to video speaks to some of the less-than-savoury spammer practices such as:
- Creating accounts using fake email addresses
- Using pictures of “hot chicks” to garner more followers
- Using a screen-scraping technology to auto-follow pretty much anyone contributing to the public timeline
With the stability problems that Twitter is already having the practices that this software promotes and enables need to be shut down or at the very least severely curtailed.
Lets just consider this scenario: 50 people were to purchase this software and each register 1000 accounts (completely feasible considering the methods employed) Each of those accounts were to aut0-follow 20,000 people and get a 10% follow-back rate. Each of those spammers sent out 10 messages per day through each of their accounts Twitter would need to relay a staggering 1 BILLION tweet-spam messages.
50 x 1,000 x (20,000 / 10) x 10 = 1,000,000,000
So let’s stop the bullshit before it starts. Twitter needs to take proactive measures to explicitly forbid this type of practice, and if necessary put in place the necessary legal safeguards to protect their servers and their systems from the DoS attacks and QoS degredations we’re likely to see.
Protect Our Tweets!
For more information on the issue, see the post at regravity.com; let @ev and @biz know that software like this concerns you too!
Tags: DoS · microblog · social media · spam · tweet · tweet spam · tweet tornado · twitter8 Comments
I’m as supportive of commercializing services like this as they come but I have no patients for SPAM. Thanks for the post, I didn’t really think about the opportunity for abuse before it.
TweetTornado only adds followers, People have to click on the page and choose to follow someone so there is no spam involved, only optin marketing. The only people who receive anything are the people who follow and give permission. Everyone needs to realize this is not like a typical spam tool. This is permission based optin marketing! And if twitter would quit shutting the accounts down for no good reason then the software wouldn’t have to create unlimited accounts anymore. I don’t see how this software is bad for twitter, anyone can do the same thing without software the difference is this software saves you alot of time following people.
So to all you people who think I am wrong, ask yourself this question…
If a person must willingly choose to follow me and it is also their choice to click on my link to see whatever I am offering to “help” them, Then how could this be considered spam?
P.S. thanks to the blog owner for advertising my service, I’m getting lots of new customers now.
By adding followers indiscriminately Tweet Tornado already causes email spam. Twitter was designed so that people who were interested in what each other had to say could look at what people had to say, or read their bio and choose to follow them. Tweet Tornado, by default, follows everyone who decides to tweet publicly. Though I still wouldn’t support it’s use the product could make itself far more targeted by following users which meet specific conditions like certain keywords in their bio.
In addition, your video (as I mentioned above) talks about methods to dupe people into following you. The presented in the video explicitly states that it’s advantageous to use a “hot chick” as the avatar.
Services like this will increase the number of twitter users closing their accounts to the public stream to avoid spam follows. It’s sad, really, that you can’t see what tools like this could do to the community.
It really is interesting. The followers opted in, and they can opt out at any time. Sounds like any fair mailing list. Aren’t mailing lists automated also? Yes, they are, they just sit there collecting users.
However, tweet tornado is different in that it does this proactively, wasting the bandwidth on twitter.com. Their advertising condones falsely luring users, and then sending them unwanted messages, which is spam.
“Using a screen-scraping technology to auto-follow pretty much anyone contributing to the public timeline”.
It isn’t screen scraping, the timeline is available in their API, as well as specific keyword based queries since they acquired summize.com.
A good comparison of Tweet Tornado is to email harvesting bots.
Tweet Tornado is way over priced for a simple program like this. A one time fee might be justifed but a monthly fee of $100 and rising. Give me a break, and i really doubt they would stop selling it when 500 users are reached. FAIL
This program is good for any business. it isn’t spam because people actually have a choice to receive your message. If they follow you back that means that they have opted in to receive any message that you send out. So it is not spam at all. I think that the software is good but the monthly fee is insane.
The problem with crap like Tweet Tornado comes from the spam email that’s sent every time someone follows you (default Twitter setting), the load of spammy marketing tweets that appear in. They also muck up the public timeline, and the ability of people to game the system by creating enough traffic on a given topic, or set of keywords to get those keywords ranked in twitter trending topics.