Earlier today and yesterday you may have seen loads of tweets flying around about free membership to TweepMe if you retweeted details of it.
TweepMe billed itself as “the fastest way to accumulate followers on Twitter. When a new member joins, every other member automatically follows the new member, and the new member follows them back. The process is gradual and happens over the course of weeks or months depending on the number of TweepMe members. ”
So basically, you joined, and everyone already in the network followed you, and you followed them – a bit like a Twitter Follower farm.
I was really surprised to see some of the people sucked into this, and really happy to see that Twitter have seen fit to suspend @TweetMe currently – I hope they stay banned.
To my mind, following and gaining followers on Twitter is no different to any other network – it should be done organically and based on wanting to hear what the other person says.
I only follow 500 or so people, but still find it difficult to keep up with the noise sometimes, so goodness knows what it would have been like with everyone following everyone else – remember you’d more than likely (unless you changed your @ settings) end up seeing not only everyone’s Tweets but also their @ conversations too – rendering the whole thing a mess and positively meaningless.
A good decision by Twitter in my opinion.
Nikki Pilkington
NikkiPilkington.com
TweetMentor – http://is.gd/nFox
Agreed. What is the point of Tweepme anyway? Twitter has a way to follow everyone – called the Everyone link on the homepage!
This service must be loved by the TwitEgotists or Internet Pyramid Sellers though.
I am not surprised at how some people got sucked into it. If the motive is to get numbers, there are some who like shortcuts. They don’t want to build relationships, but grow a list to sell to. The real folks do it the real way, one tweet at a time.
I only look at the top two latest twitter anyway and avoid the time consuming mess.
The problem is that twitter encourages having a high follower count, by giving the best placement in user search results based solely on # of followers.
“I am not surprised at how some people got sucked into it. If the motive is to get numbers, there are some who like shortcuts.”
It is the Herd mentality hard at work. When you have people e.g. @AlohaArleen promoting TweepMe to 55,000+ Followers, things can get out of hand rather quickly. I’ve been documenting the entire TweepMe Rise and Fall. I’ll be adding more as additional information becomes available via me feeds.
TweepMe – Twitter Self Replicating Human Virus
http://www.SEOConsultants.com/twitter/tweepme/
You may want to update your story. The http://twitter.com/TweepMe account was banned for their use of the Hummingway program. Their new account, http://twitter.com/Tweep_Me is still active.
http://twitter.com/Tweep_Me/status/1343471395
AMEN What a great way to take the thing that makes Twitter so powerful – connection – and turn it into a virus. NOT in a good way. Authentic engagement is the only real way to go viral – and there’s no way to automate authenticity.
As a relative newbie to Twitter I hadn’t come across TweepMe until now.
Why would anyone want to take part in an automatic follow? It would just take all the fun out of it! I can barely keep up with the tweets I have let alone all the other tweets out there!
The TweepMe Turd will not enjoy TweepMe for long.
Read this hilarious piece to find out what is going to happen to them:
http://www.tamurajones.net/TweepMeEffect.xhtml
ROFL!