It was up around 10,040 when I got up this morning. Several hundred will be me spammers and bots, but that’s always the way.

Near as I can tell, @lettercult was 10,000th.

I’ll add graphs and more later. Need to sort new phones this morning!

I’m at about 3,700 now, without trying hard and know that without even trying hard I can add the maximum if 1,000 a day if I wasn’t fussy about not wanting all the spammers and affiliate marketers and sundry parasites…

Seeing a number of gits lately that follow you, get a follow back – then unfollow you a day or two later. These I return the favour too!

Also seeing a lot of spam lately for followers – even more than usual. This normally takes the form of:

“Follow (@x) and you too can have 500 followers a day”
~ invariably from someone following 900 and with 200 followers

or

“Get 10,000 following with (affiliate link)”
The software in question invariably ask $97, or $197 or even $497 and makes often ludricrous claims, like having over a million followers.

Yet – for obvious reasons – they give no link to their @twitter account, or there will give a graph PROVING their claims – err, a graph with the account name blocked out… Riiiight!

If I remember I’ll add a few screengrab of these clowns, but it’s not the point. The simple fact is the vast majority of these sites have only one or two things in common. One they are multi-level pyramid scams whose only use is to inflates the starters following and/or it’s a money scam for dodgy software that, even if it works, if liable to violate the Twitter API conditions and get banned. Then start up under another name, maybe with a slightly different interface.

To prove my point for few days I’ll accept all the affilialate spam parasites, MLM scum and related undesireables – and possibly treble my following to as high as 10,000 or so in the course of the next week!

My first thought was to folow all my (followfriday) friends but that has a few flaw:
1) Ewww, no, that’s just creepy stalking!
2) It would get really spammy for all concerned
3) Most probably wouldn’t follow back anyway and even if they di they would soon unfollow due to the the 2) factor.

So, I will work on the autofollow factor – manually, of course. Watch this space!

*Several hour later* Piggin’ time consuming, partly because Twitter keeps throwing a hissy fit over the large number of adds, and equally because even greatly lowering my standards, most of the accounts on Twitter are frankly unsavoury.

Stats

Current rank with Twitter Grader is 27,682 out of 2,342,032
Current grade with them is 98.9/100 (high was 99.1)
Followers 3,690
Following 3,428
Posts 2,138

Stats: (Thurs25/06/09):

Current rank with Twitter Grader is 2,140 out of 2,366,128
Current grade with them is 99.93/100
Followers 5,210
Following 5,138
Posts 2,414

That score puts me almost in the top 50 in England. Nice!

Few days later – No way am I going to get 10,000 by the weekend. Not because it’s not do-able as such, but because of all the damned bugs and because Twitter keeps slowing under the weight of all the users, especially at times like 3.30pm in the UK as you can literally see it grinding to a halt as all the school kids get home and log on.

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; SU 3.23; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)
Timestamp: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:48:48 UTC

Message: Object doesn’t support this property or method
Line: 1006
Char: 11
Code: 0

It should be noted that while other browsers like Firebox don’t report an error, neither do the actually do anything. Very frustrating!

After a bit of questing and probing it seems that unfollowing counts towards your follow count. Sensible really, but a bit of a begger. If I’d known I wouldn’t have unfollowed so many this morning. Ah well, you live and learn.

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 29,545 out of 2,313,079
• Current grade with them is 98.8/100
  (Hmm, though it was 99.0 yesterday. Need to work in it!)
• Followers 2,701
• Following 2,933
• Posts 1,367

Notes to self:
Look into PRWeb.com

While I remember, this is a good article: Learning Twitter – the Golden Rules

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 48,501 out of 2,291,507
• Current grade with them is 98.1/100
• Followers 1,852
• Following 1,875
• Posts 1,066

Tips and Suggestions
Congratulations! We could not find any areas of concern with this twitter account. Tweet on!

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 57,640 out of 2,256,562
• Current grade with them is 97.7/100
• Followers 1,124
• Following 1018
• Posts 879

Tips and Suggestions
Congratulations! We could not find any areas of concern with this twitter account. Tweet on!

*(Health problems, meh!)

Anyway, got better things to do with my time than wait up to 10 minutes at a time for a page to refresh. From now on a day can be considered one where I’m actually trying stuff on and about Twitter, rather than a chronological one.

For today, I was selectively adding a number of interesting candidates from targeted search, but it’s frankly very tedious and extremely time consuming. And when you are aiming for 1,000,000, well… Anyway. Got fed up and added a hundred or so that from the name and profile looked vaguely human (hamsters, vcats, dogs and pet iguana’s aside!).

It was also soul destroying. For every ten pages I looked at you’d find perhaps a handful worth a glance – and the majority of those will be affiliate spammers on one sort or another. Thinking to work on the basis of adding 100 or so a day like this, leave it a few days, then weed all the unplesant ones out. And, of course, any that don’t follow back. WEll, most. A tiny few are actually humorous or useful enough to follow in their own right.

*Humphhh!*

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 68,722 out of 2,215,099
• Current grade with them is 97.3/100
• Followers 968
• Following 1040
• Posts 706

.

My initial idea was to randomly add thousands and get follow backs based on whatever interest went through my eclectic, fragmented and frequently chaotic mind. Then it occured to me, I was following and attracting a growing following of frankly boring spam bots run by ‘marketing experts’ and ’seo consultants’ with affiliate links promising 2,000 followers a day – yet after 2 weeks they’d got about 2,800 followers between them. Please, do me a favour. I may be getting senile but I’ve been around computers forever. Seen it all and ain’t believing a one of you!

Anyway, I dropped on a couple of nutters like @ceggs and (Content Warning!) @satans_thong, @elbeard and @shtfck and it occured to me… When my wife – probably rightly – isn’t keeping me in check I’m not exactly a full shilling. My own self assessment is fairly reasonable: ‘Tall, grumpy, genius‘. Thing about genius is the fine line between it and madness. So, without going into details, I found my niche. In milliontwits I am going to be mmyself, as much as is possible, and may your God have mercy on your soul!

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 68,722 out of 2,215,099
• Current grade with them is 97.2/100
• Followers 842
• Following 794
• Posts 575

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 75,134 out of 2,213,932
• Current grade with them is 96.9/100
• Followers 748
• Following 684
• Posts 390

Threw in sentences like:

#quote OMG For real I’m an eff err #socialmedia affiliate spammer. Click here () to find how i got $38,800 and 10,000 followers. RT plz

and

In the news today scientists at MIT have created self-replicating silicon based #nanobots to try and contain the escaping carbonite sludge
32 minutes ago from web

Breaking news: Caltech physicists are mass producing germanium nanotubes to try and eradicate rampaging carbon bloated Silcon #nanobots
30 minutes ago from web

Conspiracy update, captured on mobile phone: Intel clean up crews are stealing the Ge based #nanobots for use in future 32nm chips
27 minutes ago from web

WAKE UP! Don’t make me poke you with an affiliate link!
25 minutes ago from web

Wasted on them, but 99% are automated, timed replies. The “marketing experts” are just relying on numbers to get results:

Create 100 accounts and use automated software to scrape 2,000 names a day to each, send a timed message every 30 minutes. Soon get to the point where they are sending out 48 (a day) x 100 (account) x 20,000 (scraped followers) messages a day. Pure, unadulterated spam, but I guarantee there are probably already people sending anything up to 100 million affiliate links a day, getting maybe $50 per hit. If only 1 in 100,000 work that’s still $5,000 a day pure profit.

Twitter is already dead, it just doesn’t know it!

See also: The evil of affiliate marketing on twitter

Today stats :

• Current rank with Twitter Grader is 92,374 out of 2,212,513
• Current grade with them is 96.1/100
• Followers 651
• Following 935
• Posts 219