twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
Spamalicious
If there is a Hell, we hope it has a special level there for spammers. Lots of molten lava, wailing and gnashing of teeth would be nice.
Spammers are the bottom of the barrel in the advertising world. They waste our resources and our time forcing ads on us, whether we want them or not.
Based on our observations, the spammers on twitter can be broken down into 3 groups. Let us know if you don’t agree.
Don’t Know, Don’t Care
Twitter can be wonderfully self-correcting. We were alerted to such an event today by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @ephant, who sent us an alert about @megturnr who was dropping big bird bombs on twitter:
Yup, the same message to tweep, after tweep, after tweep:
Interested by widgets? Look at this new kind of widgets alerting you on your desktop (url) Cool a?
The Fail Bird put on his editor hat while reading over my shoulder: No one is interested BY widgets. They may be interested IN widgets. “New kind of widgets” should not be plural, and, “Cool a?” is so wrong, I’m not even going there. (He stomped off in disgust, dropping pinfeathers everywhere, muttering about the dumbing down of the English language, what’s wrong with schools these days, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, yada yada…)
Fortunately, he didn’t have to deal with @megturnr himself. Just like how the unsightly, empty house at the end of the block, rotting on its foundation, spurs the neighborhood to action, the twitter community banded together to do something about their latest spammer.
If you’re reading this @megturnr, you might want to take the friendly advice offered by some of the many people you annoyed. Twitter is not about advertising, it’s making connections and building your reputation. What you’ve done is start off on the wrong foot, which may keep you limping on twitter just long enough to get suspended.
When someone sends spam, or acts in another socially unacceptable way, it makes us suspicious of anything they say or do. The widget may be good. But, we trust word-of-mouth, and @megturnr’s mouth spews crap, so we believe her product must be crap as well.
After getting big pile of negative response, ole Meg posted something new:
No, we don’t. Not at all.
Buh bye.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Box 191 Radio City Station
There have been many talent shows over the years where the good, the bad, and ridiculously awful vie for notoriety and a few minutes of our attention. It started with Vaudeville and Carnival Side Shows, and graduated to The Original Amateur Hour, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Real People, Star Search, and now American Idol, America’s Got Talent (kind of a misnomer, if you ask us, but we digress), etc., etc., et cetera.
Our favorite of them all was The Gong Show. Occasionally, someone truly talented was booked, and the power of their performance stood out above the jugglers, dog handlers, contortionists, and regulars like The Unknown Comic and Gene Gene The Dancing Machine. Mostly, though, it was filled with the chaotic nonsense of talent-deficient performers, evidently fueled by alcohol, a fierce competitive nature, and the mean-spirited encouragement of so-called friends to try out for a chance at fame. We loved the gong. We cheered on Jaye P. Morgan as she often had to fight her way to the gong so she could voice her opinion on the lack of talent on stage.
Unfortunately, there’s no gong on twitter. Because is there was, we’d be beating that thing every time @insultgen posts an update.
A proper insult requires wit and creativity. Done right, it can lead to retweeted and quotable immortality. Just using rude words like @insultgen does isn’t enough.
We make fun of lots of people on this blog. And it’s not always easy. Sometimes, we see a tweep whose posts are ripe for ridicule, but the words just aren’t there. We write, delete, and write some more. And, usually when we’re done, it’s because we are so done with the whole process and hope someone, anyone at all, will find a speck of humor in it. And, to all of you who hate us (Hi Marcia), we know they aren’t all gems.
Insulting has become such a lost art form that we’ve decided to give you a few tips, so that your insults will hold the right amount of venom. And, if published on twitter, perhaps a RT or two.
1. Know your target. If there is something they are particularly sensitive about, that’s where the insult will hit home.
2. Don’t use the obvious. If they are fat, they probably know it, so saying “You are fat” won’t have the same impact as “Dude, step aside, you’re blocking the TV… and half of Detroit.”
3. Don’t use swear words – they’re so over-used that people don’t really notice them. Instead, use words that will mean something. If you encounter Mr. Fullofhimself who won’t shut up, you could say “he’s f*cking full of himself,” but we suggest that instead you put him in his place: “Do you speak any language that non-gibbering idiots can understand?”
4. Of course, if you’re really in a pinch, you can fall back on a Yo Mama / His Mama joke, since those usually get a laugh. But skip the “Yo Mama is so fat…” jokes and go right to the punch, like when David Lloyd said to a particularly horrid writer, ”Your parents owe the world a retraction.” Now that’s funny.
@insultgen says their website (and tweets) is a puerile attempt at humour. There is nothing intelligent about it. (We agree!) It is the lowest denominator of wit. It is the mouldy, decaying scrapings at the bottom of the comedy barrel. However, that isn’t to say the tripe this generator pumps out isn’t amusing. Far from it.
We disagree. @insultgen: those insults are so lame, their crutches need training wheels.
Okay that was bad.
How about: How do you know when @insultgen is going to say something good? When he starts his sentence with: “The Fail Bird said…”
Think you can do better? Give it your best shot in the Comments.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Quack Quack
Sometimes these things write themselves. That’s great, because sometimes we have to do actual work, so this means we get to skate a little.
We’ve taken to using Seesmic to manage our twitter account, because we can set up userlists of our buds, and separate windows for any search we want to run, so we (hopefully) don’t miss our friends’ tweets. When we saw this tweet to our friend, @jackassletters, we went to investigate.
@get_webtraffic may be miffed, but we say if the first 7 tweets you post are ads to people who are not following you, you just may be a spammer. This guy has a total of 12 tweets, and we’re posting them all here so you can judge for yourself.
We’re guessing @get_webtraffic, who so far has NO, count ‘em: zero, posts about “getting web traffic,” but does link to a website where you can BUY web traffic (yeah, that’s a good thing) is one of those politically-correct junkies who doesn’t like it when you call anything by the name it really is. Kind of like how stewardesses get all uppity when you call them a stewardess and won’t let you call them an air waitress, either, even though it’s perfectly accurate, thank you very much.
He also has twitter accounts under the username of @a1webtraffic and @buy_webtraffic, where he is tweeting the exact same tweet to bunches of people who aren’t following him (beginning to sense a pattern here) that happen to link to the oldest, lamest SEO advice we’ve seen in ages.
A closer look at the bios on these three accounts shows that this tweep is confused about whether his name is Michael or William. We’ll just call him Donald.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
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