Twitter Wars

Anyone who happens to follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve worked myself into a slavering rage about this bloke and his pyramid scam, www dot tweetergetter dot com.

Briefly, dodgy geezer Gary McCaffrey had written a script that automates Twitter follows based on a pyramid system. When you sign up, you automatically follow McCaffrey and the person who recommended you to the system, plus a fixed number of “levels” below that individual. An automatic Tweet is then published to your feed, publicising the system so that further suckers can sign up and follow you, your referrers and - of course - McCaffrey himself. The hype around the system initially suggested that it can help you build up a following of more than 19,000, a figure that has subsequently been revised down to match the 15,000-odd that McCaffrey, and McCaffrey alone, has gained as a result of the system.

Of course, like all pyramid scams, it relies on its victims not understanding the limitations of exponential growth in a non-regular, finite system. On the levels immediately below McCaffrey himself, a few early adopters have picked up a handful of new followers, seemingly in the order of tens or hundreds rather than the thousands the site’s headline seems to promise. A few got blocked by other users. The only real winner was McCaffrey - who currently has thousands of new followers as a result of his trickery.

He’s claiming that sceptics like me are simply jealous of his follower numbers. Nope: I’d rather have 15 followers who are really interested in what I had to say than 15,000 who don’t give a monkeys and only follow me because I’m abusing the community with a system that automates the process. More thoughts on this in a later post…