techPresident - A New Twystery In Our Midst - Comments

My suspicion: Twitter spam.

rklau — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:39:58 -0400

My suspicion: Twitter spam. The account owner(s) hope you'll see the vaguely familiar names and follow them. They'll automate posts to the account for a time (just post headlines mentioning the individual's name), until they build up a set number of followers, at which time they have a semi-captive audience to which they can blast whatever spam they want. Assuming this is all automated, it doesn't take any time to set up, and even though most followers would unfollow as soon as the spam starts, it's a way of ensuring you get delivery into what is otherwise a spam-free medium (for the time being).

I'm testing this - I just set up 'honeypot' as a Twitter ID and followed my real Twitter id (rklau). If I'm right, at some point the spammers will follow my 'real' ID, and the bot will then auto-add 'honeypot' as well. I'll report back if I get any interesting results.

-----
Rick Klau
e-mail: rick@rklau.com
weblog: http://www.rklau.com/tins/

I got these too

Dan Ancona — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:47:35 -0400

About a month ago maybe? Some kind of spam thing, I'm guessing.

Gilmore

Bill50 — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:38:06 -0400

Since Gilmore is the presumptive Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Virginia, it probably isn't odd that he would have recently started twittering. However, the link you posted appears to be an unofficial, perhaps anti-Gilmore account. The official account is http://twitter.com/Gilmore4Senate

A New Twystery In Our Midst

Joshua Levy — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 13:36:58 -0400

This morning I received notifications that a slew of new Twitter users were following my tweets:

"Wow, is Jim Gilmore is really starting a Twitter account now?" I didn't ask myself. Obviously someone is up to some twitchery, and I'm half-determined to get to the bottom of it.