Figure this out for me: someone's been on Twitter for a grand total of eleven days, but he has amassed an incredible fifteen thousand, eight-hundred eighty people he or she is following. And he or she is being followed by over two thousand people.

I just refreshed the page, and there are another fifteen new follows.

https://twitter.com/osen

What the fuck?

I mean, to amass 15,895 follows in eleven days, you'd have to do about 1400 of them every single day. Assuming they have ten hours free per day to do this, that's 140 per hour, or one every 25 seconds or so. How the hell can you even click fast enough to find that many new people to follow? And why would you do it?

If it's a bot, it's a decently clever one. If it's a person, I'd say they need to get a hobby. A different hobby.

1. robbie04/19/2008 12:24:33 PM
Homepage: http://www.adrianferrero.com

it was an experiment by { Link } to see the follow-back rate of twitter
{ Link }

All you have to do is read Osen's updates, it says that it's an experiment directly

2. jmcurious04/17/2008 02:25:03 PM
Homepage: http://htttp://www.blagbook.com

Following me too since a couple seconds ago...

3. barryod03/15/2008 12:22:00 AM
Homepage: http://www.twitter.com/barryod

He followed me and I googled him and found this! Its all very Pattern Recognition / gibson. I was clicking through some of his twits and found him recommending twirl which I've promptly clicked through on and installed. I have a feeling he's some sort of marketing bot but just very clever. Been a while since I've been socially engineered (at least that I recognised it, Roll up to win at Tim Hortons!)

4. DC03/14/2008 09:57:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.bigulo.com

Just added me. Seems like a bot of alright, I'm guessing it's a research project of some sort.

5. rob03/13/2008 08:38:48 PM
Homepage: http://www.gensyn.com

Same here. It's gotta be a bot of some sort, presumably harvesting for some future spam effort. I noticed it started following me immediately after I posted for the first time today. I've seen a few people who just follow every single person they can, but they seemed to be regular people, nothing on this scale.

6. anonymouse03/13/2008 09:13:12 AM

What's Twitter?

7. yosef03/11/2008 09:29:23 PM

he is flowing me today..

8. Turtle03/10/2008 03:41:21 PM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

yeah, I can't figure out the angle on this one. Maybe just some stunt pilot, like that kid years ago who wanted to get more postcards than anybody.

9. n[ate]vw03/10/2008 01:15:40 PM
Homepage: http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/

I've had this on a number of occasions with people who are basically (or totally) spammers: they follow you, hope you follow them to boost the page rank of all the junk they link to or hope you click on every link to every one of their blog posts they put up.

This guy/girl seems to not quite fit the pattern, but I'm doing my usual block/unblock routine just to keep my circle from becoming some sort of Facebook/Myspace style disaster.

10. Tushar Bharadia03/10/2008 12:50:39 PM
Homepage: http://timmybravo.tumblr.com

I reckon it's automated. Check out the last tweet, it's from 2 days ago.

11. Turtle03/10/2008 11:29:54 AM
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/shell.nsf

Wow, what a workload! he or she must not have a job or something, because they have no time to click on anything else all day. They're almost up to 20,000 already.

12. Tushar Bharadia03/10/2008 10:22:25 AM
Homepage: http://timmybravo.tumblr.com

I clicked around some of his posts, trying to figure out why, and found speculation that he's adding anyone who posts, and people, especially newbs will follow him in turn. Hence he has 2700 followers, who are probably, like myself, doing it just to find out what the hell is going on.

13. Gregg Eldred03/09/2008 11:13:34 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf

Nearly 19,000 now. Unbelievable.

14. jansegers03/08/2008 10:53:15 AM
Homepage: http://webosophy.ning.com

She/He is following me too since today.

I found this posting like I was looking for more info about Osen Komura { Link }

hoping to find a profile or such, because on the twitter no homepage is mentionned.

Anyway, this way Osen Komura is getting famous, because of the mystery she/he is creating for many of us...

I'm going to blog about it, I think, referring to this question...


I've already blogged about a tweet of her/his, namely:
plants tweet two, you know - { Link }