This business model isn't analogous to "promoted tweets" or "Twitter ads". It's analogous to "email spam".<p>You're a spammer essentially. Using an automated bot to fake a human interaction (favorite) in order to get my attention and get me to follow you. It doesn't matter that it's more effective than "Twitter Ads". Twitter Ads are marked as Ads, your favorites are not. I really do hope Twitter shuts you down, as well as those follow bots that follow me 10 times a day and unfollow me the next day.<p>Sadly, Twitter doesn't do much to combat spam so they likely will not. But don't fool yourself into thinking you are going to partner or be acquired by Twitter.
It's amazing how much devs want to build on top of Twitter. There's got to be an opportunity for Twitter to monetize that instead of fighting it and pissing everyone off. Why can't they just have some reasonable fees for API access?
I'm (somewhat) surprised by the lashing out and negativity towards the service in many of the comments.<p>Any product or service can be used for evil by evil people.<p>I've used Myles' service. It works amazingly well. So well, in fact, we looked at using his API to integrate the functionality into Socialyzer. We ended up not coming to terms and we built some scripts to do this for ourselves internally.<p>We use this functionality to build a very targeted following of people who may find our service (<a href="http://www.rewardrkt.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.rewardrkt.com</a>) useful . Our conversation rates from favorite, to follow, to registration on our site are extremely high. The people we auto-favorite are finding value in what we offer.<p>Favoriting their tweets is an efficient way to "introduce" yourself to someone without being super pushy.<p>After Twitter shutting down Flattr I reached out to Myles again to see if he'd seen the news. Of course he had, and I see his blog post as a bold move. Why wait around for doomsday if you can either (1) make it go away or (2) bring it about faster and move on to the next thing afterward.
The problem with the approach of wanting to get caught, is the assumption that Twitter is going to care whether your approach is superior to their Twitter Ads approach. They will not care, judging by their past history. They'll most likely shut you down and go about their business with Twitter Ads. These days Twitter is an extraordinarily rigid company when it comes to anything outside their borders.
I'm confused. Why would someone who's running a profitable business, that works, expose their techniques at the risk of killing the business? You know it may be shut down at some point, so print cash until that point arrives. Not sure why someone would sabotage their own business this way. Is the appeal of recognition that significant?
You're a bad citizen, mate. Not of Twitter, but of the Internet. The things you are doing are helpful to shitty people who want to get followers artificially, and obnoxious to good people.
My first thought is: This is a great way to get their attention. If you've been surreptitiously flying under the radar up until now, I think that stage is long gone.<p>On the flip side, maybe instead of shutting you down, they should acquire you and then shut you down. That's a win-win, right?
There is another flaw in the business model: It feeds off the assumption that when someone favourites one of your tweets, it's because a person liked it, not a bot trolling for followers. I suspect the reason Twitter Ads is 20x more expensive for a follower is that it explicitly states that it's a "promoted tweet" and that throws up all kinds of guards. Once that cat is out of the bag, the cost to acquire a follower using the favourite-method is going to go up.
Yeah, it's really hard to get in touch with anybody at Twitter.<p>My account has been hosed for two weeks, I log in and just get an error message -- once I log in I can't even view the help page. And of course, there's no option on their forms for the problem I'm actually having. I've been thinking about sending a fax to their number for law enforcement queries since somebody might at least see it before they throw it away.
I receive an Internal Server Error. Here's a link to the cache - <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-should-shut-me-down&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fedu.mkrecny.com%2Fthoughts%2Ftwitter-should-shut-me-down&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...</a>
Even before Twitter's recent aggressive behavior towards developers I would have expected this to get shut down. If this became something widely used Twitter value to me would decline. The entire favorite feature would just start to be ignored by a majority of users.
Having signed up myself out of curiosity, I can't actually find any method of paying for the service, which I find strange as you mention you're making a lot of money from this venture.<p>For me, it just sounds like this project is merely a throwaway project and the aim is to get banned, at least then to get onto the Ads API where they may have another concept, but couldn't get on it any other way.<p>Might be me, might just be extra dubious, but it doesn't look right to me.
I don't like this trend with services being shut down by the big guys in the industry. You see what happened with AppGratis, and now this. I understand the whole TOS violation thing, but when a big company can shut down a <i>successful</i> startup just because they don't like what they're doing, it doesn't jive with that whole capitalism thing.<p>Is there anything we can do about this, or is it just a product of building on someone else's platform? Obviously, this has happened throughout history, but on a much smaller scale. I can't recall something as prevalent and simply integral to most people's everyday lives as Twitter/Facebook/the App Store where this sort of heavy-handedness could happen. Even when Windows was in its prime, people could pretty much build anything they wanted for it (for better or for worse).
Even though, Im not a fan of your "spam" approach (and the fact that you're still a kid taking people for total idiots) I must admit the idea and especially what it lead to is a success, at least for you.<p>My opinion, is that ads suck, most of them do (except the ones that make you laugh and remain classics which in that case fall into another category, and as far as I'm concerned that only happened with TV commercials and a very few "internet" ones) ... and being spammed even though it's becoming a habbit with all the interwebs bullshit we've been and have to digest everyday is more than annoying.<p>You seem to be smart and you should definetly put your talent in something else.
Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search for existing precedents if you don't already have a decent knowledge of legalese.
Yeah, this sort of thing isn't new. You just never hear about it due to how well it works. The OP has actually made a lot of people angry by making this public (not me, though). There are other ways to game these platforms. Twitter is actually quite susceptible in other ways (not telling). Anyhow, next time be smart about posting stuff like this. There are quite a lot of bad people gaming these platforms. A mistake and you could be on the cross hairs of a botnet.
So I tried out the service (followgen.com) today - targeting "#ruby", "software craftsmanship", "hacker news" and "software near MY_GEO_IP_THING" - because I was curious. It would be nice to have a bit more exposure to developers for things like technical blog posts and new projects, so why not?<p>It favorite'd several hundred tweets for me today (btw twitter makes it very hard to mass unfavorite, I had to write a bit of javascript). I got one new follower: a recruiter. Given the sub-one percent "conversion rate", I turned it off.<p>I'm not sure if I picked bad targets, or if more technical users are less likely to "follow-back". But, those were my results, do with them what you will!<p>edit: I'll add there were quite a few "misfires" that led me to favorite some rather strange tweets - particularly #ruby which I favorited several tweets about people's young children or pets named Ruby.
The "plea for public support" blog post is getting old and frankly immature.<p>You knew Twitter's TOS & you broke them. That's okay if you're willing to put up with the business risk that--if you gain scale--Twitter may be forced to buy you (eBay/Paypal, Photobucket/Myspace) or at least work with you.<p>That said, your service as others acknowledge below is akin to spamming. This is not a service that is for the betterment of Twitter users AND advertisers. It merely betters your company's coiffeurs and advertisers who are getting "a deal."<p>You want to win Twitter over? Make it painfully obvious to customers what is occurring. Disclose your business metrics. Put out case studies that show how both users AND advertisers benefit.<p>The appeal for public support/disclosure is old hat.
Interesting read, but I'm kinda confused. Some questions:<p>- Why does the application have to be web based? Why don't you build a desktop application where the user has to use their own API key? This will also help bypass the IP limit.<p>- Aren't you already breaking their terms? [1]<p>"Using [third party applications to “Get More Followers Fast!”] is not allowed according to the Twitter Rules."<p>- How many favorites can an account do every day? Is it unlimited?<p>[1] <a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices" rel="nofollow">https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-a...</a>
you don't need more vms to get around their rate limit, you just need to query their api using a clientside language like javascript, that way the ip twitter gets is the ip of the user, not your servers. The company I work at has awesome search, so I have a tool which grabs tweets from individual user's streams (if a customer has an issue with my product and tweets about it I like to search their public twitter stream to see if they've mentioned us or our competitors lately). My script is a python one using httplib, but I realized that I could just as easily make these queries using jquery and send them anywhere I like. This moves the rate limit from your server's ip to the user's ip. If a bunch of people are using your product from the same office it could be a bit of an issue but you could probably detect that (with their 420 chill out code) and use one of your vms ips until that office's ip cools off again. That'd probably make your overhead quite a bit cheaper I'd imagine.
I'm not quite sure I understand the point of this post. If you see spamming as an amoral activity, either shut it down yourself, or continue knowing that you are profiting from amoral activity.<p>If you don't, then please continue spamming. I think that would make you a pretty big a-hole, but it's your life. <i>shrugs</i>
Shameless plug.<p>One of the ways to start thwarting this spammy behavior is counter-network of twitter accounts, randomly inter-followed for further legitimacy.<p>Once a follower is identified as a spam, it's being mass followed. It would skew conversion rates and perhaps force clients to pay for fake followers, which they won't appreciate.
"My data showed the cost of a real, targeted follower on my platform was about 12 cents, versus $2.50 on Twitter Ads"<p>The cost is lower, but can someone do studies on the lifetime REVENUE of a real, targeted follower? It might all be meaningless if that number is 0.01 cents.
I'm guessing they'll move fast to do exactly that now that you've waved the red rag in their face.<p>This part won't make them any happier:<p>>> I started renting a large cluster of virtual machines to scale the service while staying within Twitter's 'per IP address' rate limits.
There is another company that does this - I forget it's name, but they didn't explain what they did - just that they had a model to 'find quality followers'<p>Quickly I got sick of the number of favourites it did - it was really spammy. I am not a fan of this model.
Make as much $ from this effort and move on. Who gives a shit about what Twitter does or does not do. It's all just blather and nonsense anyway. If Twitter was shutdown tomorrow - would anyone care - hell no.
This isn't really anything new. Countless people and companies do follows, favorites, etc. just to send that notification and get some eyeballs. Props to him for automating it and monetizing it, though.
So specifically what "Terms of Service" is he violating? I looked through it and couldn't find anything specific that addresses automated "favoriting". There was some vague stuff about spam.
This is cool!<p>An option that is probably more likely to be API TOS friendly is to show the user relevant tweets and suggest that they favorite, rather than auto-favoriting them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this service automates the process of favoriting someone's tweet? What was the conversion rate in terms of someone following you back if you favorited their tweet?
This is an incredible idea, and it looks like you executed your design well, and even had the gusto to put school aside to go 100%.<p>If anyone deserves to succeed, it's you man. I hope twitter comes around for you.
As the saying goes, "Where there's profit, there's a way". If you feel that being in breach of Twitter's terms of service will get you shut down, you need to devote everything you've got to finding a solution where they don't can you, but you keep your revenue model. Maybe it's hard to hear, but I'd suggest trying harder to get a meeting with them, or hiring someone as a go-between to set up a meeting. Also, a technique that a friend taught me is to connect with the person below your actual target in the company, and build a relationship with them. Then they will help you set up a meeting with the person you actually need to talk to. (btw, they call this the Cheerleader tactic.) Good luck!