On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Dossy Shiobara<[email protected]> wrote: > > It's obviously an incredibly thin line ...
It's the same line you walk as a marketer. On the one hand, you want to provide value to your followers, so they will keep following you. On the other, you want to extract value efficiently from those followers, because you're not in this for your health. Let's imagine you want to peddle crap on Twitter. All you need is a bit.ly account, TweetLater, TwitterFeed, and Google Alerts. You schedule a bunch of innocuous crap on TweetLater, so you look like a normal Twitter user. You pipe a Google Alert via RSS through TwitterFeed. You watch your bit.ly account. Within a week, you'll see a trend where clicks through to your Google Alerts spike - a lot - at a certain time of the day. So at that time of the day, immediately before your Google Alert posts, you post the link where you peddle your crap. Your followers are just like Pavlov's dogs. They are already /conditioned/ to expect your link at this time, and to click on it. And at that point, it passes off of Twitter, and the Twitter folks have no dominion. If you're any good at this (especially if you lack ethics and morality), it's all over but the payment processing. Now imagine that you force ALL these services to come down. You actually manage to kill all of them. Even Google Alerts. And you can have a pony, too. Then someone goes and writes this: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/curl --basic --user "my_twitter_username:my_twitter_password" --data-ascii "status=`echo $1 | tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"; Anyone with a reasonable amount of Linux experience can now instantly see that I've lost nothing. I can automatically schedule tweets by using cron. I can split RSS feeds with existing tools, then strip out the beginning and tack on a shortened URL - all I need is a short domain name with some 301 redirects on it. What, exactly, are you going to shut down NOW? Twitter itself? Or just the API? There's no technological solution to this. It has to be social.
