Twitter Crusades Against Paid Whuffie [uSocial]
Are you ready for another round of holier-than-thou technology pundits to tell you how much better they are than certain other unnamed Twitter users? Do you miss the blogosphere beat-downs of companies like Izea, but you’re just tired of hearing the alliterative term “pay-per-post?” Do you love being preached at and warned not to do things you probably wouldn’t have thought of to do before you were told how evil you are for even considering it?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re in luck. The blogosphere has announced it’s latest crusade, and it’s being led by the Twitter-folk themselves.
The story comes originally from Caroline McCarthy over at CNet:
Twitter may be working to stop companies that partake in the controversial practice of selling higher follower counts, according to one Australian company that claims Twitter is trying to shut it down over allegations of spamming.
On Monday morning, a marketing company called uSocial sent out a press release to say that a brand-management firm hired by Twitter (according to some Australian news outlets, the firm in question is called Melbourne IT, whom we have contacted to confirm but not heard back from yet) had contacted it to express concern over spam messages it was supposedly sending through Twitter.
"The definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false," uSocial CEO Leon Hill said in the press release.
If you’ve surfed around the Web 2.0 world at all, you’ve probably seen the ads here and there promising you mountains of followers, if only you sign up and plop down the right amount of cash. One such company that offers these services is uSocial. I’ve never used uSocial or any other service where you purchase Twitter followers, but I can’t imagine they’d be all that effective for those looking to engage others on the status microblogging service.
There are significant issue on Twitter that could be termed spam. Duncan Riley and Robert Scoble have both written about it in the past.
Looking for rants on pay-per-post schemes (who isn’t!)?
Start here:
Friend-adding services, though, aren’t the villains (or at least, the act of selling friend adding services in and of itself doesn’t constitute spamming by any definition I’m aware of).
Still, it hasn’t stopped many pundits from decrying the practice of paying matchmaker services like uSocial from adding to users’ follow counts. Adam Ostrow termed uSocial “shady” in a post at Mashable. Upon hearing the news, PaidContent editor Rafat Ali tweeted: “Twitter looking to shut down uSocial, of MJ twitter followers buyer/spamming fame. As it should.”
So far, the pile-on has been minimal, particularly surprising given the light news cycle this week. I expect it to grow, though. Using material wealth to gain social media whuffie is the central bit of what’s so offensive to purists in pay-per-post schemes, and uSocial is just another version of the original theme.
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