Comment by bradleyjoyce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradleyjoyce | Hacker News Reader

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I'm (somewhat) surprised by the lashing out and negativity towards the service in many of the comments.

Any product or service can be used for evil by evil people.

I've used Myles' service. It works amazingly well. So well, in fact, we looked at using his API to integrate the functionality into Socialyzer. We ended up not coming to terms and we built some scripts to do this for ourselves internally.

We use this functionality to build a very targeted following of people who may find our service (http://www.rewardrkt.com) useful . Our conversation rates from favorite, to follow, to registration on our site are extremely high. The people we auto-favorite are finding value in what we offer.

Favoriting their tweets is an efficient way to "introduce" yourself to someone without being super pushy.

After Twitter shutting down Flattr I reached out to Myles again to see if he'd seen the news. Of course he had, and I see his blog post as a bold move. Why wait around for doomsday if you can either (1) make it go away or (2) bring it about faster and move on to the next thing afterward.

So you spam favorite twitter too? You know you are breaking twitters tos just like the op and degrading the value of twitter the same way an email spammer degrades email?

De-valuing it for whom, exactly? Given the number of people who are following us back and registering for a service that is extremely relevant/important to them, it's hard to see how there is any degradation of value for anyone involved.

In fact, they are gaining value out of it.

That sounds exactly like the rationalization any spammer would make. After all, some people want an online pharmacy, right?

You can say any rationalization would be exactly like the rationalization a spammer would make.

Who's spamming and who is not?

I would argue that the way we're doing this is not spam, as it is clear the people we favorite are getting value by virtue of the fact that they are following us, registering for our service, etc.

Some serious questions:

What percentage of people who you auto-favorite follow you back and/or register for your service? What threshold do you consider appropriate.

Do you have any visibility into the people who are annoyed by seeing your robot interaction in a place that they feel should be reserved for human interactions?

How would you feel if every single service provider interested in finding you were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention?

> What percentage of people who you auto-favorite follow you back and/or register for your service? What threshold do you consider appropriate.

It is greater than 50%. As I said, we do this in an extremely targeted way. We may only favorite 10 tweets in a day because the targeting we do is so specific. To be honest, I haven't thought about any particular threshold being appropriate/not.

> Do you have any visibility into the people who are annoyed by seeing your robot interaction in a place that they feel should be reserved for human interactions?

No, but I think you already knew that. This question sounds like your projecting your personal feelings quite a bit.

> How would you feel if every single service provider interested in finding you were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention?

Personally, I wouldn't even notice it. I have all notifications turned off for that type of stuff. If anything, they'd be giving me more exposure to the people who may look at their account/favorites.

I'd like to tweak your final question (with the assumption that this sort of thing could, someday, provide value).

"How would you feel if every single service provider you were interested in finding were to favorite all of your tweets to get your attention."

I'm not suggesting that the technology is there yet, but the future is a big place.

That premise is entirely backwards.

Anyone I'm interested in finding I'll go searching for. They don't need to inject themselves into my interactions list just because they might trick me into getting my attention.

Do you want to get my attention? Great. There are plenty of well understood and well established ways of doing that. Place an ad in my favorite magazine, sponsor a podcast, create something so great that people can't resist telling me about it. Just don't spam me and pretend you're doing me a favor.

The technology is already there. This is, to a degree, what we do at Socialyzer.

We analyze your social audience (location, activity, tweet content, etc) and use that information to predict when and where you should engage with them.

We don't take it to any automated action other than publishing your content, but it's possible to do.

> Our conversation rates from favorite, to follow, to registration on our site are extremely high.

Can you give an indication how high? Greater than 1%? 10%?

Does (somewhat) surprised mean that you know it's kinda spammy and are willing to ride that grey area til it gets shut down?

Or you think it's just a super clever (and cheap) way to get around actually paying Twitter to promote your posts?

How effective it is doesn't enter into the equation really.

To be honest I never even thought of the service as spammy, which is why I was surprised to read so much of that in the comments here.

If people are upset/annoyed that is was automated.. fine.. do it manually.. the fact remains that it is a very effective method to build your audience in a targeted fashion.

Maybe Myles should just "pivot" to compete with Little Bird and focus on just surfacing the data on who you SHOULD be engaging with.

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