Reasons to stay far away from TweeterGetter.com

As soon as this started appearing in the public Twitter timeline, I smelled a rat.

RT @garymccaffrey has a crazy idea. 19,530 new twitter followers in 30 days? Check it out http://tweetergetter.com/*

Sniff, sniff.

Put simply, this gentleman claims that by getting five new people to follow you every day on Twitter, and then getting them to follow up the chain, you could achieve 19,530 Twitter followers in thirty days. This is beginning to sound strangely familiar.

Yep, folks, it’s an old-fashioned pyramid scheme. Just like the free iPod/laptop/Mac Mini/camcorder schemes, and the old letters you used to get through the post (or e-mail, or BBSes).

Although it doesn’t involve money, it uses Twitter followers as a commodity. The growth rates speak for themselves: as the growth is exponential, by fifteen days, in theory (assuming five followers join each loose end per day) one would have thirty billion, five hundred and seventeen million, five hundred and seventy-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-five followers. That’s just over five times the population of planet Earth.

Eventually, all pyramid schemes collapse, because they run out of gullible people who fall for them. Then we come to the ethical aspect: do I really want thousands of new Twitter followers who I don’t care about, or don’t really care about me?

At present, although I follow more people than follow me, I have a good relationship with my followers. I tweet, I @reply to them, they @reply to my tweets. (In fact, it’s scary how much I know about some of these people, and it’s probably scary how much they know about me.) However, if you have 17,000 followers, that ecosystem is destroyed.

The whole point of Twitter is that it’s a social messaging service. If it’s not social, it’s nothing more than a glorified shoutbox. Let’s not turn it into the farce of MySpace bulletin nonsense.

But what’s this? Let’s take a closer look at the creator of this website, Gary McCaffrey, after the break. If you don’t want to bother, just read this.

From this point onwards, I will be unfollowing and permanently blocking anyone who promotes TweeterGetter. That’s that.

On Twitter, Gary McCaffrey lists his website as instant-affiliate-generator.com*. Yep. It’s another spam marketing scheme.

Quite amusingly, there seems to be a series of blog posts on this blog (warning: strong language, referring to Mr. McCaffrey variously as a ‘douchebag’ and a certain word rhyming with ‘runt’) documenting conversations with him, and–even better!–publishing an embarrassing forum post he made that reveals his true motives.

bananafish [ed: McCaffrey]

i’m going to try to catch up with steven fry with regards to number of followers. 

going to keep my following under 100. 

and try to get 2000 followers by the end of february. 

why? 

for fun n profit.

Not only has he mis-spelled Stephen Fry’s name, he’s demonstrated that the main reason he’s doing this is for profit. Of course, as soon as suspicions started arousing from other people, he went on the crude offensive (warning: very strong language follows)

munchingmonster

garymccaffrey is a household name now. spam king. ha!

12 Feb 2009 04:21:09

bananafish

the stir this is cuased is crazy… im in the midst of all sorts of debates from imo jealous fuckers!

12 Feb 2009 04:30:56

bananafish

never expected this reaction from the ‘elite’ twitter crew, im an instant star!

12 Feb 2009 04:34:23

bananafish

theres already tonnes of cunts blogging about this thing. nuts.

Well, as it happens, his ‘elite’ twitter crew are, in fact, the people who use Twitter as it’s MEANT to be used. Not as a revenue-generating service.

That said, the TweeterGeeter website was a bit of a giveaway. It bears all the hallmarks of a spam website: salesman-style tone, centred text, ‘protected by Copyscape’, etc.

Just for the record, I’ve reported the TweeterGetter account as spam to Twitter’s spam catcher. I encourage you to do the same, and get this crud scraped from the bowels of Twitter.

*for your information, rel="nofollow" has been trundled out again to ensure this doesn’t get any link love.