2008-03-26

MORE FREAKING TWITTER POSTS! WHEN WILL THE INSANITY END!?!?!?

Want to collect peoples email's using Twitter?  Why not?

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.

2008-03-11

OK, let's continue on in the same vein and talk a bit more about Twitter. Specifically, let's talk about using Twitter to amplify your Blog, or (better yet) your blog farm.

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.

2008-03-05

As most of you know by now, I <3 Twitter.

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.... 

2008-02-26

From now on, whenever people ask me why I love twitter, I will simply point to this post.

....'nuf said.

2008-04-11

A step-by-step guide on how to waste your time spamming Twitter.

Using twitter as a link dump for backlinks really isn't a very disruptive use of the system. You dont need any followers, so you don't have to worry about mass-following a whole bunch of people and annoying them by inflating their follower-count or clogging their email with notifications. I really don't see any problem with doing this because it doesn't annoy anyone.


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.

2008-07-08

A little distraction, and a chance for research....

So today I had this idea for a little mini site that parses twitter updates, called I Could Be Anything.

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.