Tech consultant for Olympia, Lacey, And Tumwater

Twitter gives a hand to help the Spammers

Twitter Fails Again

So it seems that the Twitter gods do not even understand their own site. This shouldn’t shock me as these are the same people who had thought it was ok for a staff member to pick “happiness” as their password. These people obviously know jack squat about security and stopping spammers.

So what have they done now? It seems that they have asked SocialToo to discontinue their “auto-unfollow” feature. This lets a person automatically un-follow anyone that unfollows them. A great trick of spammers is to set a bot to follow several thousand accounts, wait for those people to follow them back, and then un-follow those people. This makes the spammer look like they have this massive following they don’t deserve. Then those parasites can trick people into all kinds of nefarious things. This can lead to hacked accounts, stolen identities, and any number of other things. All because the spammer was made to look more legit than they should. Setting an auto-unfollow through a great service like SocialToo helps keep that problem in check.

So if SocialToo is the one that will discontinue the service why not revolt against them? Well, SocialToo is pretty much held hostage by the fact that their entire service lives within the Twitter system. If Twitter does not approve them, they die. Although Jesse is too nice of a guy to come out and say it, Twitter is pretty much forcing him at gun point to kill this great service. It is not at all his fault, his choice, or his decision really. He provides a service to Twitter users, so Twitter has all the power.

So who will join me in trying to save Auto-unfollow? On Tuesday Jan 19th at 12:00 pacific can everyone send out a message that says “Tell Twitter to save auto-unfollow because it helps stop spam! #saveautounfollow” If we can make this a trending topic more people will know about this oversight and maybe Twitter will actually think about this stupid mistake.

So I have been using Twitter for awhile and was going nuts trying to find a tool to clean things up. A big trick of spammers is to follow a ton of people to get them to follow back. Then a week or so latter unfollow the person. So then the honest people end up with a horrid ratio between followers and the accounts they are following. It is a trick to make the spammers look honest and to make the honest people look like spammers. So what do honest people do to defend themselves?

Well I hunted down a tool called SocialToo. It has many options. Some of them I strongly recommend you avoid. However the other half are very powerful and I can’t recommend them enough. When I tried this service out it worked so well that I thought it had messed up. It cleaned out more than 100 people that were not following me back. So when I looked at my numbers I thought it has made my following higher than my followers. Not sure why I only saw the last two digits of the numbers, but I made a total douche of myself and kind of freaked out over the guy who created the thing. When I saw my mistake I made my humble and embarrassing public apology. It worked so well it threw me off!

So let me be as clear as I can with this part. Stay clear of any and all auto-follow features. It will make you look spammy. However, there are two unfollow tools you can pick within the SocialToo service. One of them will cost you a one time $5 fee. After using it I would pay $5 per use. This feature will get you all cleaned up so you can start psedo-fresh. I say psedo because you will still be following everyone that is following you. Just the people that are not following you back will be removed.

Now to keep your account clean, take the guy up on his free stuff too. If someone unfollows you at any time, this will automatically unfollow them right back. These two features will keep your ratio looking very professional. If you are active on Twitter and really trying to get the most out of it this is a must have! If you have way more followers than you are following it makes people think you are important.

When you follow SocialToo creator Jesse Stay, let him know I’m thrilled to find out he is way more cool tempered than I am. Unlike me, he acts like a professional. DOH!

Important links:

• Follow SocialToo
• Follow Jesse Stay
• Sign Up for the SocialToo service
• Follow me!