"Emma wants to keep up with you on Twitter"

[unixronin]

"Join Twitter now for free!  [...] This message was sent by a Twitter user who entered your email address."

Yeah, right.  Who the *%&$%@#@!(&( is Emma? I don't know anyone named Emma.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody named Emma has my email address that didn't harvest it off a mailing list somewhere or other or out of somebody's address book.  And whoever this fictional Emma is, "she" entered the same email address twice.

So now Twitter have become spammers...  great business model, guys.  Let me know how that works out for you.

Comments

[merlinpendragon]

LOL! I was already against Twitter - I don't even like Facebook (I've tried it twice at the urging of friends or relatives). I liken FB to Prime Time TV - it caters to the masses, but doesn't have anything actually intelligent.

Twitter is more like a bad case of diarrhea. In 140 characters or less, update the whole world with the most minuscule nonsense of your daily activities. I wouldn't sign up for that on a bet! Hell, there isn't anyone out there that I want to know that much about!

[unixronin]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I consider Twitter the blogging service for the sound-bite generation — people who don't actually have anything to say, but want to make sure the whole world hears it. The one reasonable use for Twitter I've ever seen was a website status report that cymru saw once: "Site is down, we hope to be back up in four hours. We'll keep you posted."

[ithildae]

I only engage in the social networking thing to keep up with friends. Period. I am only sporadic at staying current. As I know no one that twits, I have no interest in twitter. My family is mostly on Facebook, but I have significant trouble keeping up, with the incessant "gaming" on the site. There is far more to life than a computer connected to the internet.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Hey, Emma wanted to keep up with me this morning, too!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Speaking out of abysmal ignorance here, but is it not possible that the spammer has nothing to do with Twitter? I keep getting requests from people to "friend"* them on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account . . .

*Or whatever their term is.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, the "sign up" links did go to twitter.com, and came from a twitter.com address... it 's not 100% conclusive that it IS a duck, but it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and weighs the same as a witch.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

A spammer could, in theory, start using twitter as their delivery mechanism (since, as far as I know, there aren't any anti-spam mechanisms in twitter, yet). In which case, they may start trying to get more people to join twitter and subscribe to them.

That wouldn't be twitter being spammers, just twitter being leveraged by spammers.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True. I did find this on a search for 'twitter emma' (http://twitter.com/EmmaEmail), which looks kinda stinky perhaps... but most of the top search results were for Emma Watson allegedly on Twitter.

[hrrunka]

Facebook seems to do that periodically, using email addresses stored by Facebook users in their Facebook accounts that it thinks belong to people who've not yet joined Facebook.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I've assumed (and Hotmail so sorts them) that a lot of that stuff is phishing.

[hrrunka]

Quite possibly. My system dumps it in Spam rather than Virus as it does seem to come from Facebook itself rather than some third party. Either way, it's Unwanted™.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

I left a comment on DW.

[darthgeek.livejournal.com]

Spammers have been using twitter for awhile now. They're pretty quick about shutting them down though.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

someone could have just done a "send to all" option in the place where you are given the option of asking people in your address book to join. lots of sites provide that.
and it could be someone in the bowels of a work email or some yahoo list....