Twitter taking a page from the CL playbook?

I've got one Twitter account that i've been semi - bad with, agressively pushing a product mixed in with some RSS feeds etc.

I noticed last night in my tool log that the auto follow was returning the 403 cannot add more users, so I figured I had hit my 1000 for the day.

Went and checked the account and I was at the same number as the day before... but my tool logs showed that it had followed 1001 users that day.

So I investigated further. My hashtag for the promotion did not show in search or in Tweetdeck. I also could not find the account in Twitter search.

I have verified the account did not get the ban hammer, I can still log in, post, read tweets etc and my existing followers can listen to me. But nobody new can follow me, nobody can find me, nobody can see me...

In other words, I've been GHOSTED!

Just a heads up that Twitter must have various levels of 'suspended'

Yeah.... that's not true. Twitter has been updating a lot over the last week. Sometime you have followers, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you can follow others, sometimes you can't. Give em a week to get their ish together

Yeah, I've been writing aps that use the API so I've been seeing the juggling first hand all week. This account may be caught in the shuffle, but i've verified via my other accounts and friends that follow all my other accounts that this one has just kinda disappeared.

It may not be a technical 'ghosting' but it has the same result - its basically worthless from a marketing or social standpoint at this time.

Twitter is someday (soon) going to crack down on the API. About 2 weeks ago they changed the "posted from" line to reflect that API tweets came from the API instead of from web. My guess is that relatively soon, most tweets that don't come from the web will be ghosted from search results, and hundreds of auto-follows/unfollows from the API will flag your account for suspension.

That just means that automated tools need to login/post/follow/unfollow through the web interface instead of the API. Maybe an extra couple hundred lines of code - not a huge deal. The API is kind of the lazy man's way out anyway...I was automating all kinds of myspace stuff before any social network even thought about APIs. Hummingbird had the right idea with regard to this, but is WAY too manual for me.

Twitter has become another spam ground anyway..... my recent efforts to market there haven't done crap lately. When everyone's followers are marketers, it's hard to get anyone to even see your tweets they scroll off the front page so fast.

I guess I haven't found the right things to try to market to the marketers, or the same problem, they follow so many people to keep the ratio even, and a tweet might stay on their front page for a whole 10 or 20 seconds before scrolling off......

what is the max amount of followers can you add in a day to a account. I have 17 accounts and doing 400 a day. Can i add 800-1000 withought the ban hammer?


Let me know

Thanks,

And you can always use huitter and multilation and remove all the non followers...