If you bothered to look at the people I follow on Twitter you will notice that I do follow some SEO people. LOL

An ‘SEO people’ filter may not be enough. Pretty soon, anyone who has signed up for TweeterGetter will need a spam filter.

Gary McCaffrey tells me that he is not collecting passwords, but he *is* collecting usernames. In other words, he is building a list of everyone who signs up for TweeterGetter regardless of who they follow or later unfollow.

Prepare for the spamstorm.

http://mike.brisgeek.com/2009/02/14/tweetergetter-twitter-password-harvester/

So that means… Pro TweeterGetter = Nay TweeterGetter

Interesting!

To be serious for a minute though, you are EXACTLY right. It has worked out to being Pro JaceMan too. Before I blogged about this “controversial” app, I had 0 comments on my blog. Now, in a couple of days I have had over 30 between the two articles. All press is “good” press as they say.

No one is hurt by the process, least of all Twitter themselves… why? If you like TweeterGetter you promote it (and thus Twitter)…

If you hate TweeterGetter and see it as a scam, you tell people to avoid it and talk about Twitter…

So… both sides of the coin benefit Twitter.

As a marketing tool, it can be hailed a success for all of the attention it has received and this in itself is enviable…

Well done to Gary…

When I first encountered TweeterGetter I was concerned that it asked for my pw. So I passed on it until a Twitter friend of mine whom I respect used it. Then I used it and no more than 5 seconds later I started seeing all these tweets condemning it. I started feeling terribly guilty.

But the points you raise are all very valid. This whole argument about quantity vs quality of followers is a bit of a non-starter. If quality was the issue, no one would ever have more than about 30 to 50 people that they followed. Why? Because who has time to read all those tweets? So whenever you see someone following 1000 people, let’s not fool ourselves. Those are not 1000 “relationships”.

One of the key points to Twitter is getting your message (monetized or purely social) out to as many interested parties as possible. If TweeterGetter helps toward that endeavor, what’s the harm?

Thanks again for the post!

http://twitter.com/mattbovell

I’d make one more point these days all my links when I comment now point to http://twitter.com/brendan_mcnally for one reason my updates tell you more about who I am than any website will shows my changing nature everyday, my real personality. Cheers

He MAY be right, but he doesn’t have to be. Maybe TweeterGetter doesn’t provide the most “targeted” followers, but who’s to say I want “targeted” followers. Maybe I am open to diversity, debate, and growth that comes from hearing from people who DON’T think like me or AREN’T interested in the same things I’m interested in.

It would actually seem to me that IF you were only pulling in followers who were interested in “get followers” products, THEN TweetGetter would be a problem. It would be an even bigger problem for its users too, considering you would all be competing for the exact same market.

No, the real beauty of TweeterGetter is as you already pointed out, you’re free to unfollow people at any time. When I signed up, I was required to follow 6. I examined those 6 accounts and chose to continue following 5 of them. Not a bad rate of “like-minded” thinkers (i.e. 5 of the 6 did NOT strike me as spam accounts) if you ask me. Since that time, I have had about 100 people follow me. I have chosen to follow almost three-fourths of them. The other fourth, I passed on because they did seem spammy to me; thus I had no desire to follow them back and nobody was forcing me to do so.

So, maybe those 25% (your percentage might vary) will notice I’m not following them and choose to unfollow me. *shrugs* Big deal, we just agreed we weren’t interested in “doing business” with them anyway. Right?

He’s right.

Not that followers who only started following because of their participation in the scheme have zero value. Who knows who they are – they could turn out to be great contacts. But they are much less likely to be great contacts than people who have chosen to follow you because of who you are and what you have tweeted.

I suspect followers acquired through tweetergetter would be great followers to have if you wanted to sell a “get followers” product – or some form of internet marketing through twitter product.

But the chances of them being useful contacts outside of that are low. Not zero – but low.

Having said that – I played. Got a few extra followers. We’ll see over time how it turns out. May even just work because by having more followers I look more “followable” to someone looking.

I don’t think it will result in too much extra tweetspam – as if you don’t want to receive any you just don’t use tweetergetter – and you unfollow anyone who spams you.

Ian