Webupon

I had to check out the rave about Twitter. If you’re not yet familiar with Twitter, let me give you a brief background. Twitter is a micro blog site where people can write short comments of up to 140 characters. It is essentially a text messaging service that is based on the Net.  As there are mobile devices that can send and retrieve “tweets” it is not strictly bound to a computer. Twitter started growing in popularity in 2007 and has continued with a recent growth explosion. According to Compete site analytics, Twitter had 22,997,148 unique visitors in June 2009. This is up from January 2009 by approximately 17 million unique visitors according to Compete. Needless to say, Twitter has become of interest to a lot of people. In my nearly 2 decades of surfing the net I have seen a lot of changes occur but the one thing that has stayed consistent is people’s interest in finding ways to use the Internet to make money.  One way of doing this is to duplicate a business that is successful and the other way is to use a successful business to facilitate your own interests. Now that Twitter has reached its current stature it is susceptible to those who want to ride the wave.

Who would have guessed that a 21 year old student at Western Kentucky University would make such an impact to the users of Twitter in such a short period of time? Li Hall of Owensboro, Kentucky started a business called VipFollowers.com where he facilitates a way for members of Twitter to obtain followers quickly.

Something that is a little unnerving is the Terms of Service which includes:

1. You agree to submit your twitter account credentials.
2. You agree to allow us to store your account information in our database.
3. You agree your account will be used to automatically tweet an update on your account for promotional purposes whenever needed, with the exception of VIP members.
4. You agree upon logging in you allow us tweet an update on your twitter for promotion.

Taken directly from vipfollowers.com website.

Whenever Needed!     Are you serious!

And people are signing up in droves. And this is causing quite a disturbance to the Twitter community. There are several comments by Twitter users stating that they have enough followers or they can’t get opted out of the service. You will notice that each post that you make will be quickly masked by the multiple “promotions” following:

“I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://vipfollowers.com“

If this is a problem to have so many “promotions” posted on your profile and you want to still gain followers, there is an option. By becoming a VIP member and paying a fee you can still obtain more followers and you will be able to do so without having promotions posted to your profile. Does this sound anything like protection money to you?

With the stable reputation of a company who registered their domain clear back on June 23rd of 2009 I couldn’t’ believe what happened one day. The opt out link as well as the contact us link were non functional. As of the date of this article (July 10th 2009) it seems to be resolved for the time being.

VipFollowers.com is far from the only company who has set up this type of service on Twitter. Morefollowers.net also registered their domain name on June 23rd 2009. Paul Motgomery also of Owensboro, Kentucky is the owner of this company and lives less than 4 miles from Mr. Hall.

I thought I would dig a little further to give these young men the opportunity to show some credibility so I checked with Kentucky Secretary of State Online Business Data Base to check to see if VipFollowers or MoreFollowers were registered businesses. I deselected the box labeled Limit Search to Active Organizations Only and the search returned no relevant results for either of these businesses. I thought perhaps they are registered as sole proprietorships so I ran a search on their names but unfortunately this didn’t return any results showing a registered business either in both cases. One last thought I had was to check to see if the business names are available so I searched; VipFollowers and then with .com, MoreFollowers and then with .com, Li Hall and lastly Paul Motgomery to see if the names had at least been registered with the state. The following was the response in each case:

“The name is available. No companies were found which match your request.”

It is possible that the registration is still being processed as the domain registration was less than a month ago, but I would think that a reputable company would register with the state and receive their business license prior to doing business on a local level let alone worldwide.

This is not the first case and I’m sure it won’t be the last case of individuals or companies trying to capitalize on successful companies. The frustrating part of this case particularly is the affect that this program has on Twitter. Although Twitter has created a simple interface to allow us to write short messages to the world, my personal opinion is that they need to secure there database and screen for inappropriate content to both those who don’t want to see it as wells as to minors. Overall it is a fun little program that lets the world know what we are up to.