Automatic Following Systems for Twitter: Death of Twittter

Post inspired by: http://tweetergetter.com/

I'm quite angry at Tweetergetter. Systems like the one Tweetergetter uses are probably going to ruin Twitter. Here's why:

How would the Future look like?
Think for a second about the future of such systems. Tweetergetter is actually quite a limited system, it only makes you follow a percentage of the people using Tweetergetter. Lets imagine the perfect auto follower system for Twitter. People would enroll in the system and hand their Username and Password over to it. The system would then make all of it's users follow all of it's users. This means that enrolling in the system would be the equal of everyone in the system following you and you following everyone in the system. This is the ultimate auto follower system for Twitter, lets call it the MagicSystem for now.

So what?
The chance that a system like the MagicSystem will gain the upper hand in the "market" is huge. Thousands of people will follow the MagicSystem while being followed back by each and everyone using the system. Over time almost everyone using Twitter will use the MagicSystem due to the huge advantage you gain over other Twitter users. If someone decides not to use the MagicSystem he isn't going to survive among all the other giants, besides it would be just stupid to miss an opportunity to gain thousands of followers for free.

Whats going to Happen once all the people use the MagicSystem?
Well there will be a perfect equilibrium between every Twitter user. Everyone will follow everyone else, no one will have less or more followers than any other person. No one will be special. This effectively ruins the entire point of the follower/following system twitter uses.

What is Twitter without a follower/following system?
Nothing.

What's Twitter doing against this?
Nothing: http://twitter.com/terms
No mention of auto-follower systems or anything like them.
Really sorry, I was too rash. Didn't read This (Scroll down to: "What is follow spam?"").
Even thought Twitter is doing something against Follower Spam I don't think they have any rules in place against auto follower systems like the MagicSystem.

What can we do?
Bring attention to this topic. Link to this article from anywhere you can. Let's hope Twitter will see the problem and do something against it. Please don't create the MagicSystem in search for power, I didn't.

Think I'm Correct/Wrong?
Comment and state your opinion.

Edits made in this Colour

The Effect of Twitter on my Site Traffic

When I looked at my Google Analytics I saw this:


My Traffic went up a lot =D
So what could have caused that? Well the only cause I could think of was the fact that I have been actively using my Twitter account so I took a look at my Twitter Counter Stats:


As you probably can see if you don't have any perception problems I gained a lot of twitter followers in the last month. I took both graphs and combined them:


Of course the the above graph is very deceiving as the ratios are all wrong, the graph is just to proof the fact that my Site Traffic went up as my Twitter Followers went up. Look at the red line (the average) to see it clearly.

I was interested in how many Twitter Followers actually clicked through to my site so I did some calculations:

Twitter Followers (last month): 400+
Unique Visitors on Site (last month): 50+
400/50 = 8

So every eighth follower of mine went and visited my site =D

Please take notice that I didn't link to my site even once in any of my twitter updates, I linked to my blog instead. I'm sure the traffic would increase even more if I linked to my site instead of my blog but for now my Site doesn't have a commenting system so that wouldn't be so good.

Also take notice of the fact that these are only my first 400 followers and that I picked most of them and they just followed back. If a follower would follow me without me having to follow him first I'm sure the chances that he will visit my site increase immensely.

So what do we learn from this?
Well I myself learned that Twitter is a great way to jump start your site and get people interested in it. I really wouldn't have thought that I could get 400 followers in 1 month and that any of my followers would even care about me.

It's amazing how effective Twitter is, use It =D

Twitter GUI 0.7 (without GUI)

The first releasable version of the Twitter Application I'm currently working on. At the moment it's more like a follower/following equaliser. When you run the JAR file it shows a window like this:


Just Click On OK while displaying eternal gratitude towards me. After that is done, Enter Your Twitter Username and Password:


Next select either yes or no:


If no is selected, the program will unfollow anyone that does not follow you. if yes is selected, the program will ask you before unfollowing someone. Now wait some time and answer any yes/no dialogs thrown your way concerning unfollowing. Unfortunately you can not see the progress as the application has no proper GUI yet, just wait for a while. It shouldn't take longer than a minute for this to appear:


Congratulations! You have just followed anyone that followed you and unfollowed many that you followed but that didn't follow back.

This isn't a final release yet as you may have guessed. The application was just designed to test any post/get methods working together with the Twitter API. My next step will be to actually implement a Graphical User Interface, not just dialog boxes.

Get the JAR file here: http://www.zirconcode.com/downloads/Twitter 0.7.jar
If double clicking on the JAR file doesn't run it, right click and open with a Java Runtime Environment.
It has been tested under Ubuntu 8.10 only. As it is Java it should work on other operating systems also but E-Mail me if it doesn't. My E-Mail can be found on ZirconCode's contact area.

Have Fun =) & Check back regularly for a proper release (Version: 1.0)

Going to work on my neural network now...