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8000 New Followers on Twitter in One Day

Written on 10th August 2008 6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

How to Get 8000 Followers on Twitter in One Day — My Awesome Blog Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.

Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.

Manatee Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.

For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.

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About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include TwitterCounter.com & this Blog. Boris is also very active on Twitter: @Boris

6 comments/trackbacks to “8000 New Followers on Twitter in One Day”

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By http://lightningjim.livejournal.com/ on Aug 10, 2008

I believe the reason she was able to do this is because her email was registered as “twitter@twitter.com”, which is the address of the Twitter IM Client. Because this email was in your GMail address book so you could use it, her account would show up in the “Find & Follow” when someone imported their contacts.

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By manatee on Aug 10, 2008

Hola! this is manatee on twitter. I have no idea who johng77536 is and would like to say for the record that I am not that person. I have explained in detail what happened on my blog post.

It’s pretty obvious Twitter has plenty of flaws (considering how often they are down). I logged in and had over 15,000 follow requests so I’m like… omg ok, sounds cool to me. Twitter has an “accept all” link button you can click to accept all friend requests.

Maybe that’s how Barack Hussein Obama got so many followers? Seriously…how else could he?

It should also be noted that I have tried to contact twitter as well and am happy to help them track down the bug. But, I’m sure they have a zillion emails to sort through and probably deleted mine long ago.

I’d be cautious with using the word “tricked” as far as with user johng77536. It’s up to Twitter, not us to keep their site running smoothly. If anyone does find something that screwy going on they should be paid consulting fees in my opinion.

:D

http://www.Twitter.com/manatee

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By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on August 11th, 2008:
Thanks for the reply Manatee. Lets just see what Twitter comes up with. I emailed them and got an answer within one hour that they were looking into it.

PS: thanks for exchanging the images I linked to on your blog for NSFW images. That was a good one. :-)

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By Sommer-GreenandCleanMom on Aug 11, 2008

http://www.twitter.com/greenmom

As far as social media goes, twitter has become a status thing. I’m in the hundreds but if I had thousands, I’d feel special. Then again how could I be like Dooce and keep up with all of them, yeah, I couldn’t. That’s the thing about numbers. It’s a number. I’m with @manatee and the idea of consulting fees. Twitter is GREAT but always down, having bugs and problems. It’s not our job to fix them.

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By tony on Aug 14, 2008

I found this whole thing pretty amusing.

http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Twit....._On_Ebay_3

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