I am not a huge fan of Twitter as I don’t do technology and to be honest I end up spending all day following interesting links and getting no work done.
However, after some time ignoring it and hoping it will go away I decided to give it another whirl tonight and guess what … Twitter has been invaded by adult dating sites.
I logged in tonight to check out the twitter feed of a blogger I particularly enjoy reading (it’s about farming so I won’t bore you with a link).
In my list of friends was a Tweet from Mike at KK Smarts (he’s an adwords guru and a thoroughly nice chap) and being supportive I had a peek and I’m pleased I did.
He has made a video about Tweetdeck showing us less technical people how to use this software. His video is from a business angle but very useful even if you’re just interested in puppies, gardening or limbo dancing.
Ever the student I downloaded Tweetdeck and made great use of the video pause button while I followed Mike’s instructions.
Because I run an online dating site for country people in the UK, write this dating blog and a countryside blog too, I like to stay up to date with what is happening in both the dating industry and the countryside.
Following along with the video I discovered that in Tweetdeck I can create columns and search for Tweets by keywords I enter.
No sooner had I created the search column for “online dating” than tweetdeck started pinging away (must remember to ask Mike how to turn that annoying pinging sound off).
The spam immediately started, at a rate of, on average, 10 Tweets per minute from just one dating site.
Of course all the avatars are of half naked models … and we know how many of those hang out on dating sites in the middle of the night … ahem!!
Most of the Tweets read like this “Indian successful guy 32 years looking for exciting women for kissing” or “Missing some adult fun? S*x makes it better.”
It’s interesting to note that all the male avatars play the “nice guy looking for a woman” card but the female avatars all say “come get some” .. psychology is an amazing advertising tool, I’m sure Mike would agree.
The website in question is tacky online dating site .. ok that’s not the real name and perhaps it’s a nice site if you like no strings encounters but boy they can spam with the best of them.
There are two things worrying me about this site.
First, as soon as I pressed the link the home page announced “members near Edinburgh”. I don’t live anywhere near Edinburgh but because my Twitter and Facebook accounts are linked and Facebook doesn’t have a Cumbria region I ended up ticking Edinburgh. So I’m very curious to know what software this website is using in order to know I am in the Facebook Edinburgh region. It’s just feels like an invasion of my privacy (is there such a thing online?).
Secondly it’s the blantant lying most of these dating sites use. After every Tweet it says “free online adult dating” but of course when you check the site out you soon realise you have to pay to even see all the profiles on the site.
Pure spam, they should go in the spam box with the Nigerian spammers and the letters awarding you £6,000,000 if you just send a cheque for £500.
Although I did have a real giggle when I saw the “report sexually explicit adverts ” button at the bottom of their home page and then went to the join now page (research people, research) and was asked if I give oral or do threesomes (and they are just the questions I could mention on this blog) … gosh nothing sexually explicit about that then!
Of course the site must be making money or they couldn’t afford to pay spammers to drop 10 plus links an hour from numerous Twitter accounts.
It’s just a shame that spammers invade every aspect of our online lives and there is some great dating advice articles linked to on Twitter but of course they just get lost in the spam.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:39 am
The basic reason of that rise is an incredible increase in desire of having dating mates.
September 11th, 2009 at 7:20 am
I tweet for an adult dating site, and try not to spam, but contibute something interesting, or tweet blog updates. I agree that there is a lot of spamming going on, most of it is automated. Maybe I’m missing a trick but it’s hard to see what the benefit is, as most people just unfollow them straight away.
Nice blog and post, I’ll be checking back to read some more…
September 17th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
It’s a real shame that sites have been able to get away with such blatant lying. Maybe the FTC will crack down on these too soon, like they’re now doing with fake blogs. Anyhow – just my 2 cents worth.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm
That is just too funny … I write a post about how spammy Twitter has become due to adult dating sites and you then spam my blog with links to adult sites (have removed the links by the way).
September 26th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Automated spamming is a problem in most of the Internet and it seems Twitter is no exception!
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
Haha the spammers here on this blog don’t seem to realize that the links are all dofollow. It was a great post sorry to see it being overun by dating site spammers in the comment section…
Marie@Breast Enlargement Without Surgery´s last blog ..
October 5th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Hi Marie
All part of life with spammers I’m afraid. The strange thing is do they really imagine people seriously looking for a good dating site to join would follow spam links?!