Twitter Zombies

I've noticed something about Twitter that I hadn't seen before, but I suppose is inevitable in the long run. The Twitterscape is populated by Twitter Zombies. It is, really.

Do you remember MySpace? Sure, everyone remembers that social networking site the same way they remember seeing the second Star Wars film. They are absolutely convinced that they visited the site and that it was awesome and that they did all these crazy things and met funny people... but no one can really give you any clear descriptions of it.

MySpace is still in existence, for those of you wondering. Heck, Ted Puffer still has a site there. No one goes to the site any more, but that doesn't mean that it's inactive. It is incredibly active. Bots and scrips run rampant across the wasteland of what was once an exciting new way that people could interface with social media friends. Automatic scrips lay in wait, lurking in the shadows for the unwary traveler who through a combination of typos and boredom accidentally stumbles onto the MySpace servers.

For example, if you create a page, you will get about 3 friend requests instantly. These aren't real people, but automatically generated links to advertisers who have been selected by the information you've set up on your page. MySpace hasn't given these guys access to your information, by the way. They don't get a penny from these advertisers. What happens is that bots constantly crawl the dusty pages looking for new people logging in.

Twitter is rapidly becoming the same thing. If you create an account, nothing may happen at first. Then send out a tweet like "Dang, got into a car accident. Wish I had better auto insurance." Before you know it, you'll have a bijillion people following you. Not people, per se. But scripts which have just gone apeshit because you used "auto insurance" in your tweet. The way it stands now, I would say that for every five people on Twitter, two are real, two are business fronts and one is a bot.

Yeah, that sounds about right. It's probably just as well. Twitter has been an interesting thing to see blossom but it's niche just was never there. It was providing a service that mankind had yet to develop a need for. And to be completely honest, the human race really doesn't need another method to connect consumers to distributors.