Tweepme: All of the Followers, None of the Work
March 17th, 2009Posted by: Hannah Del Porto Posted in Twitter
A new service called TweepMe is being released today. The website says the service is an opt-in service where member agree to follow each other.
All you have to do is put in your Twitter username and password and, sometime tonight, everyone who has signed up will start mutually following each other. As new members join, they will follow all other members and in turn be followed by all.
Twitter for the lazy set.
Tweepme is offering the first 5000 to join a free lifetime membership. Everyone else will have to pay $8.95.
The problem with this is that the Twitter community looks down on any illegitimate follower gains. You have your purists who think you should connect with every follow and distain the quid pro quo followback. You have the armageddonists who think that sky-high follow rates will render the site spam-filled and unusable. Then you have the people that worked hard for their Twitter base and think it’s just plain cheating.
There’s plenty of discussion web-side about the security of the accounts that have signed up, whether Twitter will even allow such a thing and what will happen if they do.
The tool’s own Twitter account is currently suspended – probably not a good sign.
I personally signed up with a secondary account…just to see what happens. I’ll let you know.
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Follow me on Twitter the old fashioned way.
UPDATE 3/18: I signed up with two test accounts. I then cancelled one of them to see if the request would be honored. Neither account has added any TweepMe followers, despite the site currently having 4,472 registered members. The company has also created a new Twitter account – the original remains suspended.
UPDATE 3/20: I have 15 followers and am following 8. Not sure if it’s supposed to go this slowly, but it’s not a bad plan if it is.
UPDATE 4/1: Things began happening yesterday. I now follow 82 and am following 64. Given that my test profile has a photo, no bio and 1 update, it’s understandable that TweepMe members are unfollowing me after I’m auto-added to their account.
UPDATE 4/14: We really picked up speed over the weekend – or people really love my profile photo. I am following 428, followed by 491 and 1 update. TweepMe seems to have delivered on its promises.
UPDATE 5/6: Remembered to check and now am following 2001, with 1783 following back. I’m surprised at how few un-follows given that it’s not a real account. It’s possible that people tried to organize their follows at first, then gave up when the count got too high. That’s what I would have done :)
