Before Twitter Spam was relatively harmless, someone (or some automated bot) would follow you in the hopes you’d reciprocate thereby exposing you to their hidden tinyurl links that could be anything. And seeing as I’ve been twittering for nearly 2 years now, I’ve had to block my fair share of these people, but tonight I discovered something rather disturbing that changes the landscape of Twitter Spam.
While going through Twitterrific I found a strange name in my friend updates, someone or something called @manatee (oh the huge manatee joke aside) and upon quick inspection he/she/they/it had 814 followers and only 24 friends, usually spam is the other way around, a refresh later revealed 1,270 followers… And each refresh kept on rising…
1,270… 1,684… 2,074… 2,490… 2,676… 3,138… 3,335… 4,895… And so on…
This was just in the space of 30 or so minutes… It’s pretty sad that Twitter has succumbed to this kind of spamming technique.