Kim Kardashian and her massive growth on FriendFeed: abusing the system or FriendFeed looking the other way?
Yesterday afternoon I received a message via e-mail with the following subject:
Kim Kardashian has subscribed to your FriendFeed
Since the FriendFeed redesign I have seen my follower numbers increase rapidly. To be honest though I am not a big FriendFeed guy; it isn’t that I don’t like the service I just have a limitation on how much information I can ingest and a routine down on how to get that information at this point. So while I have a profile I don’t really use the site or even have it running through Twhirl. But when a celebrity follows you that gives you a reason to sniff out what is going on over at old FriendFeed and I logged in for the first time in awhile.
So Kim added me. I know that I am important (to my mom) but I didn’t know I was that important. Visions of celluloid ridden thighs, a low-grade porn tape, and Thanksgiving dinners with Brody Jenner began to race through my head. Then when I checked her profile I noticed that she had followed over 18,000 people to that point with a whopping 8 following her back.
I tweeted about it because I thought it was funny and then checked back and noticed that she had added another 17,000 people since the last time I had checked a few hours ago. Kim’s “team” was using a bot program. (Or an intern incredibly jacked up on Red Bull.)
This kind of annoyed me on a few levels. First of all it is desperate and really not the way you want to go to gain an audience. (Less than 1% of the people she is following are following her back.) Second of all it is a blatant abuse of the system that most people would get their profile deleted for on most social networks but because she is a celebrity it is ok. This is something I have seen on a few social media sites where celebrities or “site created” celebrities have used programs to grow their accounts when it is clearly against the sites Terms of Service. This really gets to me because I think social media is a playing field where if you create good content, know how to promote yourself, and work hard you can build a fan base away from the typical systems. When celebrities are allowed to have their own set of rules within social media it makes this technology no different than the mainstream.
However when looking at the FriendFeed terms of service they do not have anything written about using bot programs or automating processes much like Myspace, Twitter, and other social media sites do. So technically her team did nothing wrong according to the FriendFeed terms of service. Much like Twitter used to be, there is uncapped adding on the system. FriendFeed, as presently constructed, is allowing this to happen.
Is this move intentional by FriendFeed? Or a something just not thought out? A lot of social media sites have had pure open access to adding people in the past and as the sites grew in popularity they clamped down on this practice. Some sites place caps on the amount of people you can add in a day (MySpace 300 and Twitter 1,000 for example) while others check to see the speed you are doing it (Facebook and MySpace) or drop CAPTCHA codes in.
FriendFeed wants to grow, they need to grow, and they have a good product but not enough users. But in order for it to go mainstream or even build to a respectable size are they willing to let people come in and abuse the system in order to obtain some growth? If yesterday is an indication yes they are.
So I’m not the only one getting a bunch of new FF followers. I like the idea of FF I just don’t create enough content in that many channel to realize the value.
Also, seems like you know alot about Kim’s video…
I know way too much about the careers of people that shouldn’t have careers.
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
[...] are just plain perturbed by all of the [...]
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
I can sort of see your point, but the kind of mass adoption that a celebrity can bring to a platform like FriendFeed can only be good publicity for the platform, can’t it?
Sometimes I think we early adopters can be a little sensitive whenever somebody famous comes along and drives publicity to a platform. Why couldn’t we do that? Because we don’t have the following.
If Oprah defected to FriendFeed, the userbase would more than double overnight (from what I hear), but they wouldn’t be the kind of techie/developer/general geek we know and love. But who’s to say that’s the audience FriendFeed wants? Aren’t we being a bit snobby about the great unwashed hordes coming into FF and friending us all? If you were running a social site and a celebrity joined up, wouldn’t you relax the rules just a little because of the exposure they’d give you?
I’m not saying you’re wrong or right, just throwing a few questions out there.
I totally agree that a celebrity joining and using a platform is good publicity and I could care less that she or anyone has more numbers than I do on FriendFeed. Also I don’t suffer from geek early adopteritis, I would rather see more common people on there because it breaks up the circle jerk that is social media. What bugs me is the tactic that they used to get those numbers because if anyone else did that (on most other networks) they would have their account shut down. It isn’t like she ported in her Twitter followers or something of that nature. This was an obvious bot program deployment, which is an underhanded tactic.
If Kim joined up and then a ton of people followed her and joined because of her… well more power to her and that is great for FF. But abusing the system is abusing the system. There shouldn’t be two separate rules for people. (And I readily admit that it is naive or wishful thinking to think that.)
Also it isn’t like mass adding is targeting her fans or getting more people to like her (look at her follow back ratio). It is building random numbers for the sake of building random numbers.
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
[...] way, it’s just going to lead to a bunch of noise. And some users are already getting upset about [...]
This is a symbiosis. Kim helps FF and vice versa, nothing alarming about it.
[...] KARDASHIAN accused of abusing FRIEND FEED to gain 1 million TWITTER followers. May16 Kim Kardashian and her massive growth on FriendFeed: abusing the system or FriendFeed looking the ot… Yesterday afternoon I received a message via e-mail with the following subject:Kim Kardashian has [...]