Jan 4

Guy Kawasaki: Twitter Spammer Posted on Sunday, January 4 2009

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Guy Kawasaki is a well known twitter fanatic. Besides having a cool name he also has his own wikipedia entry as a notable figure in marketing apple.

Guy's new site Alltop has been shitstorming twitter with testimonials about the site through sockpuppet accounts that do nothing else but talk about all top. Click the twitter searches below to see what I'm talking about. If he's spammed the results to cover his tracks here's a sql dump of 3559 unique alltop spam posts for your statistic generating pleasure.

Evidence of Spamming Sockpuppets in Twitter

Good stuff about... JUST GO TO ALLTOP
If you know anyone... THEN GO TO ALLTOP
Interested in... then checkout ALLTOP
Total info about... in ALLTOP
Just in time for my ... ALLTOP SPAM
Alltop linked my...IN ALLTOP
Yay!!!! All top has diseases feeds, my favorite!!!!!!!
I love alltop
Look I can create buzz!

Outside of twitter

I stumbled across this. Apparently he makes tons of profiles and storms testimonials outside of twitter too.

Fake testimonials again on a site that got popular in delicious

Hey guys check out these good FIBROMYALGIA feeds!

Grandma' Wayman just couldn't wake up early enough sunday morning to talk about her alltop FIBROMYALGIA feeds and share it with friends and family on twitter! What a coincidence so many other people also decided to write about it at that exact minute too!

Diseases?!

If you're wondering why the hell would alltop even bother listing the touted 38 diseases it's because diseases are good ad money. mesothelioma related sites and their related keywords were rumored to be giving over $20 per click because of the billions in potential revenues lawyers could get if they had a case. The first result for mesothelioma on google is owned by a law firm! Fibromyalgia could be just the disease du jour Guy found to be generating the best click through rates. Similarly sites similar to match.com specifically for people with HIV also gross insane amounts of revenue when an ad is very targetted. People with deadly diseases often research the internet looking for miracle cures or new information and are more than willing to pay for hope.

Twitterfeed

To be fair, alltop uses a service called twitterfeed which basically allows one twitter user's content to be auto-regurgitated onto another person's page. However it's not that many people decided to entrust their twitter account to alltop's shitstorm, it's that twitterfeed is alltop's preferred method of sock puppetry. Most the the accounts have generic names, pictures and write only about alltop. On top of that, most alltop spam is written in testimonial form to make it seem like the person is expressing their personal feelings for a stupid alltop subdomain. At first I thought it was a viral marketing service but twitterfeed seems to provide most of the spamming required on the cheap. All that was left is to generate the mass amount of accounts with fake profiles and sign them up. Many times the accounts flood a certain phrase every 20 minutes and all at the same time. The same testimonials are repeated daily by different accounts.

Sites like titturly, microblogbuzz make this type of flooding profitable. There's no chance in heck he can't know about this since half the posts on his blog these days are about twitter.

Tags: alltop, alltops, alltop.com, alltop spam, all top, guy kawasaki spammer, guy kawasai, cawasaki, truemors, howto change the world, spammers, famous spammers, twitter spam, twitter search spam,alltop.com spam






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