Twits

Or perhaps worse.

After a few consecutive 12-15 hour work-days, I needed to do something mindless when I got home last night. What better way to do this than to get on Twitter (hah!).

I took a quick glance through my feed and then, out of curiosity, clicked through to check who was following me. Now I have a list of just 43 followers, puny by most measures, but more than I ever expected to have when I first created my account. Many are people I know personally, a few seem to have found me because of stuff I've said, but there are a number of followers who just seem to be... twits. I wonder if they're even real users or just robots, possibly created by Twitter itself. They come in a few varieties. Take a look:

The Sleeper

This is one of my followers:

Now, maybe I'm being a little uncharitable here. Just because I don't know who this person is and just because this person hasn't tweeted at all, doesn't mean she's a robot. There are others on my list who I do know personally and they haven't tweeted much either. However, my point here is that simply looking at how many "users" Twitter has doesn't tell the whole story. Moving on...

The Drone

Here are two others:

and

Look closely at the date-stamps. Are these robots? Mmm, possibly. The account called windowssieben appears not to be a robot when he has an exchange with another user at some point, but notice that these are his latest tweets. After tweeting very frequently for an extended period, the road unexpectedly comes to an end in December 2009.

So... robots? Even if not, at the very least, this kind of user is a pretty pointless one as far as Twitter, its genuine users and advertisers are concerned, since all they seem do is repeat the same tweet every day. Note I haven't clicked through to the bit.ly URLs and have no intention of doing so. Caveat emptor.

The robot

Now, I don't know for an absolute certainty that these next users are robots but common sense would make it seem so. I'll give you two screenshots again:

and

You see that it's basically the same tweets in a different package. These aren't the only two. Here are a few more with essentially the same tweets: Carlee562, Codi516, and Maribel468. Just as interesting is that all these accounts were created on the same date and they're tweeting about (local) services in cities far away from where they themselves live.

Also note that I only know about the above accounts because they followed me. There may well be several more such cases. If I were more active on Twitter, would I have more robots follow me? Quite possibly.

What of it, Twitter? How many of your supposedly tweet-addicted users are actual people and not robots? How many are duplicate accounts? I wonder if this is another house of cards like Groupon. In fact, I wonder if it's worse than only ("only"!) having a bad business model like Groupon -- is Twitter actually overstating its numbers, knowingly or unknowingly? If so, it wouldn't be the first time a company has done this.

Mindless surfing? Failed miserably at that but hey, I tried.