May16

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.

__________________

that shit is too long to read over some damn twitter

__________________

If true, how pathetic....

__________________

Does she get money based on the numbers?

Serious question

__________________

makes me think of the thread I posted earlier... Mhmm...

__________________

wow

I hate Twitter. The layout is ugly and the comments read like they are being typed by people with ADHD.

I thought it was just me. It's just takes too much navigating to read Tweets between two people. You literally have to click between pages and go back and forth between them in order to see an entire conversation between two people....and nine times out of ten you're going to get distracted because of a tweet from a third party...then to see what prompted that third party to Tweet something, you have to click onto their page and scroll through it to see what led them to leave a Tweet between the conversation with the two people whose conversation you were trying to read.

The set up just sucks.

__________________

but who really cares about kim k?? and if this is what she needs to make her feel special then so be it...(she sucks at life)

......but real question...what does she do and what is she really famous for besides her cellulite and ray j and her current bf??

__________________

__________________

How lame... on her side b/c who cares about followers unless you're getting a check for it and on his side b/c why did he have to do an investigation for some damn twitter

Southerngirl if you hate this woman sooo much why do you spend so much time posting negative shit about her?? Usually when I dislike people, I simply ignore them, makes my life much easier than wasting time on the internet posting things about them just to tear them apart.

So what she taped herself fucking her then boyfriend, she's in a time and place right now where anyone can be a celebrity, no talent required. She's just milking it for what its worth, she's not the only one and if given the opportunity I don't know too many people who wouldn't do what she's doing, getting paid. Most people in the industry are whores, half of hollywood fucks and sucks their way to the top so Kim is no exception. If she dated white men would we give her this much attention, look at her counterpart Paris Hilton, she's a walking venereal buffet but she doesn't get trashed half as much on here as Kim does.

__________________

im still not understanding how she got 1 million followers from this...