twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
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! |
Top This!
When we were growing up, neighbor kids were never invited over to eat. Not that they would have wanted to accept the invitation. In contests of “My mom is the world’s worst cook,” we always won, hands down. Our mom’s cooking was so bad, we thought school lunches were wonderful. Ours is a huge family, so meals were more army-style than fine dining. Like the mess hall in M*A*S*H, meals were cooked in huge quantities, with very little variation in flavor or texture to differentiate one meal from the next.
Not that she didn’t try. She just didn’t have a talent for it.
Sometimes, she would decide to try something new, which meant repeating the new idea or ingredient, in varying degrees of edibility as she attempted to make something we would actually enjoy. We went through a long run of corned beef (from a can) before she decided Spam was a more versatile ingredient. We had Hawaiian Spam, Sweet & Sour Spam, Spam Hash, Spam & Tater Tots casserole, Spamghetti, Spam burritos, Spamloaf, BBQ Spam, Spam kebobs… We still hate spam to this day. No, not just hate, despise.
We detest all forms of spam, and since Dear Mater isn’t around to foist the canned abomination on us anymore, we can now direct that aversion to an even greater evil: spam that we are force-fed on a daily basis by our beloved computer.
That’s why we decided to try TwitBlock by @timwhitlock after we saw it mentioned by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @stinginthetail. Their pitch is: Find out how many of your followers are junk and block the twerps..
A quick OAuth login (pretty safe), a little bit of analysis, and Whoa, Nellie! There’s some really crappy people following us! Anyone with more than a score of 20 is considered suspect, so we’re not surprised that all these spelling geniuses would be right up there at the top:
The folks at Twitblock don’t tell you what the score is based on, exactly. We’re guessing it may have something to do with antisocial activity, like a high following-to-follower ratio, tweeting lots of ads, or possibly the number of other tweeps who block them. The system isn’t perfect, as some people we like, and who provide good content have a higher-than-20 score, but as a way to analyze who the creeps are, it isn’t half bad. Some tweeps are pretty obvious in their crappiness, and the other ones can be checked out pretty easily by clicking on their avatar to go to their twitter stream.
Why would you want to block someone? So that they can’t send you objectionable content, and so you don’t accidentally follow them, which would give your friends a bad impression of you. And on social media, that reputation is pretty important. Hang out with the wrong crowd, or give the impression of such, and people won’t want to listen to a thing you say.
We blocked 251 people. 43 of those have already been suspended, which means we’re on the right track. So, we recommend you give Twitblock a try. At the very least, you’ll get a cool mosaic of all the people you’ve blocked. And, if you’re as shallow as we are, knowing that You Blocked Them First will give you a sense of power you haven’t felt since that bitch in High School stole your boyfriend. (Hi Marcia)
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
You a Cop?
Hey handsome, you want some company?
What do you mean, a “date?”
Yeah, you know, follow me and I’ll follow you. It’ll be nice.
Follow you? What does that cost?
Not much. Just read my tweets.
Is that all? Are you sure?
Well, if you want a little more interaction, I’ll send you some spam, and DM you an affiliate link or two. Nothing big. A girl’s gotta eat, you know, and leopard-skin spandex doesn’t come cheap.
Okay, this is a bust. You’re under arrest for #followerwhoring.
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That’s how we imagine it going down, and in that little daydream, there’s lots of pistol-whipping and other virtual police brutality.
We were first made aware of the term #followerwhoring when Honorary Fail Bird Handler @Bytor asked us if we’d help popularize it. For all future twitter generations, this term was coined on August 17, 2009:
The definition of a #followerwhore is: Tweeple who follow zillions of others (usu. by #search search, not because they like you) hoping you follow back sans thinking. We instantly agreed with this definiton, partly because we hate spammers, but mostly because he used the word “sans” in a sentence. That’s classy stuff.
You can follow our example and call out the #followerwhores. It’s a great way to express your frustration at the frequent appearance of the fail whale. All that spam and follower whoring uses up resources that overload twitter and bog it down when the rest of us are trying to connect with our buds.
He did have one point of clarification (and again we agree with him, because we like agreeing with smart people): There’s two classes of #followerwhores. The first is the evil spammer a-holes we’ve already discussed. The second group, in a misguided attempt to be loved, follow a bunch of people, so that lots of people will follow them. Just like the girl in high school who is popular for all the wrong reasons (Hi Marcia!), these clueless twitter sluts are being used right back.
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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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