Is Twitter on the road to oblivion

[Steve Reeves]

I've been connecting with people in all different Internet sites for several months now. Twitter has been the most fun. Typically the people there seem to be open to conversation and collaboration more than other sites.

Linked In is somewhat different, probably because most of the people there seem to be wanting to sell something and that tends to sour the pot a little.

The Ning networks I've joined have been just awful. They seem to be populated by people selling stuff that isn't even real. Mostly "secrets to making money on-line" these guys are effectively spamming everybody.

Now I'm mortified to find Twitter is being swamped by the same people. Yesterday I came across somebody selling some auto account create, auto-follow and auto post software. The idea being we pay this guy $50 for the software then use to set up hundreds of accounts, build lists of followers amounting to tens of thousands and then spam them with the same post.

He claims every time he posts he gets 1% of followers visit his blog, from where he presumably gets 1% of clicks on ads.

That may only be 1 in 10,000 followers and the click may only be worth 50 cents but if he can automate the process the whole thing costs nothing and presumably over time the 50 cents add up.

Meanwhile this guy and others like him will kill Twitter stone dead.

I make it a rule to check out everybody who follows me and follow back if they are genuine. But over the last few days I've had to look at more than a hundred and only returned the follow once.

No matter how much I like Twitter, I can't keep wasting time like that.

How about you? Are you finding the same, and if so what do you think we could do about it?

[Howard Larson]

I dabble in twitter just becuase it does get hits on my blog at a higher ration than MySpace or Facebook does. Does that translate into sales? No, mainly becuse most of my target market is on on twitter or web 2.0 for that matter. Yet I want to keep ontop of the technology and the where-with-all of using it becuse I feel eventually old line business will eventually come on board.

[Steve Reeves]

Howard,

as usual I agree with you. Twitter is a concept which will eventually mature into a new medium for communication. Unfortunately at present it's been adopted by the bad guys, but I'm sure it, or something like it, will become mainstream.

Interestingly the age profile of Twitter users is significantly older than that of Facebook. That gives me cause for optimism.

Personally I find the functionality of Tumblr much more useful - perhaps that's the way all microblogging will evolve, but it needs Search to to do that.

Steve

Howard Larson said:

I dabble in twitter just becuase it does get hits on my blog at a higher ration than MySpace or Facebook does. Does that translate into sales? No, mainly becuse most of my target market is on on twitter or web 2.0 for that matter. Yet I want to keep ontop of the technology and the where-with-all of using it becuse I feel eventually old line business will eventually come on board.