Extenuating Circumstances is a weblog by Dan Hon

Twitter Friends

I wrote about Twitter before on the This Is Mind Candy blog, but something caught my eye recently. I had a friend request from someone I didn’t know, and checked out their profile to see if I actually knew them. I didn’t, but what was interesting was this:

2,461 friends! That’s insane. At least, it is from my point of view: I really don’t see the value in using a collecting mechanic on Twitter, especially if you’re using it as it’s “supposed” to be used – as a notification mechanism for friends – either over IM or SMS. Possibly over the web, but even then, that’s a hell of a lot of friends.

Are they Italian? Some of the Italian pay-as-you-go networks actually pay you a small amount for every SMS you receive, and there have been a lot of people friending the hell out of Twitter and thus racking up lots of call credit every time they get SMSed…

over the last week or so, I’ve had about 5 of these, people I don’t know but many thousands of friends and maybe a hundred or so followers. I see nothing, yet, that makes it advantageous to them to do this, except to be at the top of a list for most friends. I ignore them

Absolutely – my pretty much hard and fast rule now is to deny anyone I don’t really know.

I don’t know if they’re Italian or not – couldn’t tell upon first glance. And it’s interesting about the Italian PAYG networks – not surprised at all that people figured out quite quickly how to game the system!