Okay lets cut the drama queen (should be drama king, right?) crap now. But, I did notice something weird about Obama’s twitter. He is following way too many people. We’re not talking about a few hundred or even a few thousand here. We’re looking at a 5-digit number. 76K!

Man is that normal? Is the guy working on his campaign or just following people on Twitter? I guess he got hooked or something. Oh man I’m going to jerk-mode now. But, seriously 76K is a lot. And he’s got only 73K followers.

You wanna know how he followed back so many people? He’s using a script which automatically follows you back once you start following him. Just add him and then look at the list of your followers). But, he doesn’t actually respond to your tweets (and he’s not even interested in them). Twitter’s servers are constantly having “technical difficulties” (aka downtimes). I wonder if Obama’s account caused all of this. Probably not.

So, is he actually “follow spamming“? Well I personally wouldn’t say that. Maybe it technically falls under follow spam, but he doesn’t mean to. He’s just trying to keep people updated about his campaign. I don’t like the fact that he’s using a program to automatically follow people back, but it was probably the nuthead running his account’s idea. Well that’s a different thing.

We all get spam and find a ton of them on the web. So, we kind of go into our anti-spam/ninja-killer mode whenever we see something that looks a bit like it. We don’t really think about it and see if it really is spam. We don’t look at people’s true intentions. Well look at the definitions!

So, next time think about it and check if it really is spam. And if it is, then rape that fucker spammer. Until then subscribe to my blog via RSS or email if you liked this post (at least a tiny bit).

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you’re actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back.

That’s what the people at Twitter wrote on their blog. Well that explains what “follow spam” is. You just follow tons of people, so that they add you back and/or click on the link on your profile. Now I would agree that this is pretty annoying. But, not everyone is trying to “spam”.

On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet.

See Twitter is also saying that. Yesterday, an old lady was bitching at me and was accusing me of spamming Twitter. Hmm how so? She said that I added a “zillion” people on Twitter, so that they click the link on my profile.

Okay I’m actually interested in people’s tweets. I reply to a lot of them and have like a small conversation. I agree that I added a bunch of people on Twitter. But, that wasn’t “follow spam”. Now of course, I wanted them to follow me back. What’s the point of tweeting if only a few people are following you?

Did I add random people? No. I added people who were interested in tech & web. Most of the people I added were TechCrunch’s followers. Did I start spamming them with links to my site? No. I made like 2 or 3 tweets about my sites. 2 or 3 out of 171 tweets? Is that really spamming (or huge self-promotion)?

Is Obama spamming Twitter? He is following 64K people and he’s got about 61K followers. I’m not sure how he managed to add 64K people, but I don’t think he wants to spam. He just wants to keep more people updated.

I don’t agree with the current definition of follow spam. It should be when you follow thousands of people (who you’re not interested in) and want them to follow you back. And you spam them with your links! Maybe this would define follow spam a bit better.

I know that there are lots of spammers on Twitter. I mean the REAL spammers. But, not everyone is a spammer! So, What do you think? Do you think my way to define it is better? And what about popular bloggers who keep posting links to every single one of their posts? What about Obama?

Okay this site is being worshipped by TechCrunch. I read about YouNoodle on TechCrunch and it looked interesting. Well it was in private beta and it had a signup form. I wanted to take the prediction thing for a test drive. So, I entered my email address feeling confident that I won’t be spammed since it was referred by the holiness, TechCrunch.

Well guess what? The title of the post says it all. I’m being fucking spammed by YouNoodles. They sent me 21 emails within 5 minutes about their stupid launch. Like WTF? But, wait that’s not all. I’m going to get my ass spammed more because they sent everyone an email by CCing.

Just take a look at this screenshot. See what I mean? Now someone can just copy/paste all the email addresses and start spamming us. Plus it shows how professional YouNoodle is. Couldn’t they do something less “noobish”? Like c`mon, this is how little kids send emails to all their friends.

Now the point is that you can see how much bullshit TechCrunch posts about. They’ve got it all wrong. It should be quality over quantity. I’m surprised how they managed to get 862K readers. Lucky bastards!

TechCrunch please check things before actually posting about it. And YouNoodles can you please stop spamming me now (and you gotta nice name for a noodle company).

Update: Okay I contacted YouNoodles a few minutes back and they apologized for this. Well I don’t know if their predictor actually works because its not a perfect world. Its like trying to predict when you’re gonna die. But, I love their attitude and that’s something you need in order to be successful:

Hi,

Huge apologies, our mail transfer agent malfunctioned and batched
messages together.

You were among a small number of people affected and thanks to your
message, among others, we were able to catch this quickly.

Today we rolled out Startup Predictor to a massive audience with very
minimal technical problems of which this was one.

Thanks for your interest in what we’ve built, look forward to your
feedback. Again, apologies for this.

- Kirill

YouNoodle, cofounder

http://younoodle.com

Defensio is just awesome. Its a big ass anti-spam monster which eats spam. I have never got a spam after I installed Defensio. And what’s really great is that its free. Plus it doesn’t really mark real comments as spam. Now that’s cool, huh?

It works with WordPress, Text Pattern, Movable Type, Drupal and a lot of other scripts. Plus with your own PHP, Java, Ruby on Boats Rails, Perl and Python.

If you don’t believe that it deletes most of the spam then check out my stats (on the left).

I would suggest giving Defensio a shot if you get a lot of spam.