I Could Be Anything monitors the Twitter public timeline and looks for messages that can be appended to the words “I am”.

Back when I was doing my degree, I used to create alot of work that involved typography and poetry, so this was a fun little site to build. I played around alot with how to filter out certain stop words (he, she, etc), and punctuation marks, also I discovered that typically if a sentence fragment has more than four words between “the” and a punctuation mark, it won’t make sense when appeneded to “I am”.

Anyways, this might all seem pretty mundane, but it makes for great research. Twitter provides unlimited data for me to work with, and whenever I have time, I’ll continue tweaking and trying to perfect the filters.

OK, so maybe it’s not totally amazing, but what IS amazing is that you can leverage all these free conversations for content.

For the sake of this post, I hacked up a quick and dirty sample that scrapes summize.com to deliver keyword focused chunks of content for you to use however you see fit. This is programmed in Ruby, using the Mechanize Gem (my favorite gem for scraping).

Let’s say we’re promoting an offer for a credit check, or something of that nature. Naturally, we’ll want some content that is focused around the keyphrase “credit check”

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘mechanize’

agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = “Windows Mozilla”

query = “credit check”
doc = agent.get(”http://summize.com/search?q=#{query}”)

messages = doc.search(”div.msg”)

for message in messages
message.search(”a”).remove
content = message.search(”span”)
puts content.inner_text
end

And the output from this little chunk of ruby coolness?

Having a crappy Saturn experience.  Salesperson won’t check other dealers for cars.  Won’t let me fax credit ap.  2 hrs to pick up the car?
I always lose the new activations to the credit check.
pending credit check…. im fucking moving!!!!!!!!!
Audio Visual: No credit check contract mobiles sony ericsson,nokia,samsung,motorola order online at..
After waiting 3 fucking weeks my $50 check from ACE credit group. Gave $10 to Teresa since I owe her and kept the rest.
My credit union’s web site is back up. Sadly no rebate check. Didn’t really expect it today based on my SSN.
I’m debating wether I should walk up to Court St. to drop off a check at the Credit Union….
I’ll check out the Wings over Col. next week, new month, new credit card bill. Shade on the Canal in Canal Win. has good wings
Boo.. just short of getting my rebate check today…I really wanted to stimulate the economy by lowering my credit card debt too…oh wait..
cash or check only.  they don’t take credit or debit.  we found that one out the hard way.

Yup. Free content.

This content shouldn’t form the foundation of your sites text, but it is the perfect kind of stuff to put in a sidebar. This is good content to round out your existing pages in a relevant and unique way. I’d suggest putting this sort of content in a side bar, and making it look just like some kind of widget.

BTW, I should have mentioned: Summize has an API. http://summize.com/api

But alot of you are trying to leverage Twitter to get traffic to your sites. You mass follow a whole bunch of people in hopes that they will follow you back and then will see and click on your spam links. You’ve created a Twitter name like: weightloss or wuyitea or herbalremedy, or some other product/keyword. Then you’re scraping some tweets from rss or from related websites, or usually news feeds. You’re tweeting out maybe 4 messages a day, all at the same time, and every message has a link back to your site, or your squidoo lens.

I’ve got news for you guys: You’re all doing it wrong.

Before we go any futher, I want to mention that I’m not truly convinced that there is any substantial value in spamming Twitter to get traffic to your sites. There are many twitter users who get great traffic to their sites from their tweets, but that is because they have real personalities that people want to follow. It’s impossible to fake a personality, unless you’re Hillary Clinton (oh SNAP!). I think there are better things you could spend your time doing which guarantee better results. That said, I just couldn’t help chiming in with some advice for you all, because if you are really intent on annoying the living hell out of people with your Twitter spam, I’d like you to least justify it by doing it effectively and getting the best traffic you can out of it.

So, were I to waste my time spamming Twitter, here’s how I would do it:

1) Pick a good name. Don’t pick a product or a keyword, that just sets alarm bells ringing. And remember: You don’t need to mass create Twitter accounts. You need to create a handful of really solid natural looking accounts. You’re going for longevity here, not hit and run.

2) Upload an avatar.

3) Set your profile webpage link to a real page you own, maybe a blog, but NOT a squidoo lens or affiliate site. This is important. I’ll come back to it later

4) Prepare your script not to just pull and tweet news headlines. In addition to your regular content sources (headlines, rss feeds etc) try scraping tweets off the public twitter timeline and retweeting some of those. This will go a long way in making your account look natural. Speaking of looking natural, don’t tweet at regular intervals. I see most spam accounts tweet 3-5 times a day all at once at the same time every day. Try tweeting ~10 times a day at different times. Also, don’t put links in every tweet. Maybe tweet two links a day to your money sites, and try to vary the sites you are promoting. There are sites that track your spam account based on the frequency at which you post the same link (http://www.twitspam.com/).

5) Now that you’ve got your script ready, you are ready to start following a bunch of people in hopes that they’ll follow you back. The trick here is to appear completely natural. The more natural you appear, the better your chances are of being followed in return. Dont follow 10,000 people at once, but rather, for your first batch, follow ~200 people. After a day or so, unfollow those ~200 people and grab the number of new followers your account has. Lets say of those ~200 people, 122 followed you back (that’s pretty optimistic). You will then follow 122 NEW people, and wait another day for them to follow you back. Maybe now you’ll have 183 followers. Unfollow the 122 people you followed the day before, and follow 183 NEW people. Rinse and repeat.

This way, your account will always have a somewhat balanced following/followers count. Having an unbalanced following/followers count is a sure sign of a spam account.

6) Remember step 3 where you set your profile webpage to a blog? You can assume that at least some of the people you follow will check out your twitter page and then click through to see your webpage. Armed with this knowledge, you can get them to follow you back without them even realizing it. You do this with a little CSRF. On your page, call out this url: http://twitter.com/friendships/create/youraccountnumber. Since they just came from your Twitter profile, you know they are logged in to Twitter. By calling out that url, you tell the Twitter system to make their account follow you. You have to set this up in such a way that you scrub out the referrer on the request, so a simple 1px iframe won’t cut it. I’ll leave that part to you guys to figure out.

So there you have it. Have fun wasting your time spamming Twitter. If you need me, I’ll be busy hunting bigger game.

COLLECT GMAIL ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT HOTMAIL ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT LIVE ADDRESS TWEETS

COLLECT YAHOO ADDRESS TWEETS

Ok, I promise I’ll stop posting about twitter topics…soon….soon….

Until then, if you are a sucker for punishment, you can always follow me on Twitter

UPDATE: This loophole in the twitter/tweetscan system has been fixed. See ladies and gents? Disclosure DOES work.

I just know some of the more righteous among you are shaking your head and thinking that Im destroying good exploits by blogging about them. To which I say: Get over yourself. Its Twitter, not Craigslist. And besides, I like Twitter, so if I can contribute to making Twitter a better system by talking about its issues, then that’s pretty cool.

If you’re using a tool like Datapresser, then you already have a healthy blog farm that is autoposting content and links for you.

Let’s say we’ve got 100 new pages of content going up everyday, and everything is running smoothly. Of course, we’re always interested in ways to get easy links to our new content, aren’t we?

Well, using Twitter and Twitterfeed.com, we can automatically get a twitter account to tweet each post as it gets published, for each blog in our blog farm. That, in itself, is no big deal: it’s precisely the intended use of Twitterfeed.com. But, it gets interesting when we consider the implications of last wednesdays post on leveraging Twemes.com for backlinks.

Here is a screenshot from the Twitterfeed setup page. This should describe what I’m getting at:

As you can see, by using the filter option, we can use Twitterfeed to have our twitter account for the keyword ‘leathershoes’ tweet any post that has ‘leathershoes’ in it. Further, every tweet that gets sent out will have the Twemes hashtag for #leathershoes, which means it will be reposted to m.twemes.com/leathershoes

Now, here’s where the idea gets kind of wonky. Twitterfeed makes your Twitter account tweet the Title, Description and URL of your new content. Unfortunately the URL is a Tinyurl link, which is bogus as far as Googlebot is concerned. You won’t get any linkjuice from this link. The way I see it, there are a few ways you can make this work.

My principal suggestion is this: Twemes will publish a URL in the body of a tweet as a live link This means you can set Twitterfeed to tweet just the description of the post and uncheck the box for including a link. Then you just include your own link by making sure the URL for the post is the first thing in the description.

Your other options are:

1) If you can create a small enough Tweme – eg: #baby – you’d then have 15 other characters to squeeze in your url which would link back to your blog (Obviously this is kind of limiting).

2) It’s not always about linking, sometimes its just about getting traffic & getting clicks. I almost shudder to suggest this, but you can always tweet into the most popular Twemes at the time, like #SXSW. You’ll start pissing people off and getting your scheme and network noticed pretty quick. I really dont suggest you do this.

Have fun!

I use my main twitter account for legitmate purposes, but I’ve also been tinkering with ways you can exploit twitter for your own gain. You see, Twitter is easy to automate because their API is so easy to use. There are TONS of different sites and services out there that leverage twitter, republish tweets and so on.

A good example is twemes.com.   Twemes aggregates tweets that employ the same phrases preceded by hashtags – also known as an Octothorpe, thanks Luc – for example, right now a really hot tweme is #SXSW.

And you know what? Twemes doesnt use nofollow tags for their links.

You might consider leveraging this site as a link dump by creating a handful of different twitter accounts and creating new memes for yourself along your keywords. Your tweet might be something like, “#leathershoes this site is awesome http://www.leathershoes.com” then if you were to goto twemes.com/leathershoes, guess what, there’s your link. I made an example here.

This is just the first of many different ways you can exploit twitter for your own devious results. I’ll try to write more on this topic in the future.

Later!

PS: I should mention this one last thing: When I create a new link, at twemes or anywhere else, I like to promote it to the SE’s. Everyone has a different approach to this…personally, I use SQUIRT. When promoting the twemes linkdumps, I like to use the mobile page (m.twemes.com/yourpage) because there is less crud for the bots to choke on….

….’nuf said.

I can’t stress that enough. I have set up the payment link to automatically cut off at the first 60 registrants. The reasons for this are twofold:

A) Datapresser allows you to pull and remix content from more then 30 databases at once. As you can imagine, it is extremely resource intensive.

B) Value of content. Datapresser has access to all the databases available for sale on this website, as well as many that have never before been made publically available. So as to not encourage over-saturation of the content, Datapresser will always remain an exclusive membership program.

So, check back here or on the datapresser signup page on January 26th 8AM Pacific and the subscribe link will be live and it’ll be first come first serve!

UPDATE: someone asked in the comments if Datapresser can be used to timestamp posts, so that a blog grows naturally over time. I thought I would let this picture speak for itself

Fact is, I much prefer communication via 140 byte chunks than any other form of communication possible, and in terms of pure entertainment value, as far as forms of communication go, tweeting is second only to throat singing.

Anyways, Brian Chappell and Andy Beal cranked out a pretty great list of 75+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter, and now alot of people are adding their twitter profiles in the comments. I figured its a pain in the ass to add people one by one, so I hacked up a little something that scrapes the page and the comments and then lets you put in your username and password and automatically add your selections to your twitter account.

Enjoy.