Whilst extreme social networkers like Scobleizer, Leo La Porte and Kevin Rose have 20,000+ followers hanging on their tweets, other people are resorting to more grey hat tactics to hijack our attention – impersonating well known personalities in order to build up a following.

Some high profile fake Twitter accounts

Some of these accounts are old and disused, but others are very active and have big followings behind them. Like most things on Twitter, setting up an account is trivial. There’s no means of verification at the point of sign-up and the service is dependent on its users for exposing the charlatans.

• Seth Godin
  http://twitter.com/SethGodin
  Probably the most libellous and overtly dishonest Twitter account that I’m aware of.

  Seth Godin has publicly stated on his blog that he doesn’t use Twitter, yet this guy just keeps plugging away. I came across the subject of fake Twitter accounts, or “twitterjacking”, because of a post from fake Seth pointing me to (actually quite a cool) new site I subsequently blogged about – http://www.brandtags.net.

  The guy behind Brand Tags, Noah Brier reported 77,000 tags added to his new site over one weekend after a Friday launch. No doubt “Seth Godin” played quite a big role in the healthy launch traffic, what with having over 5000 followers and a weighty reputation behind him.

• Sergey Brin
  Pure spam. Couldn’t be further from the M.O. of the genuine guy.
  http://twitter.com/googlesense

• Mark Zuckerberg
  Its interesting that Zuckerberg seems to be genuinely on Twitter… I say this because his updates are protected (private) and he only follows one guy – a PR/social media blogger by the name of Dave Ambrose. Whats notable is that Zuck has 21000 + updates – seemingly just to this one guy.

  I’m not sure if this is some kind of in-joke between Ambrose and another contact, or if MZ has some kind of special relationship with Dave Ambrose that he likes to maintain privately on Twitter. Seems unlikely but worth watching nonetheless. Ambrose does seem to post quite a bit about Facebook on his Tumblog.

• Steve Jobs
  Less open parody and more outright impersonation than the Fake Steve Jobs (despite the lego avatar). The account is pretty much dormant, despite having over 6,500 followers.
  http://twitter.com/SteveJobs

• Fake Steve Jobs
  Open and obvious parody.
  http://twitter.com/FSJ – this is the account of the Fake Steve Jobs blogger, who is actually quite a funny guy.

• Condoleezza Rice
  http://twitter.com/condi
  This account is pretty much open parody in the vein of Fake Steve Jobs.
  Says things like: ” Red alert, bitches! That John Edwards twitter account is sooooo fake.” (sadly it’s not – might’ve been more entertaining)

• Jon C Dvorak
  The famous mac linkbaiter has someone pretending to be him.
  http://twitter.com/therealdvorak – the lowercase one is fake.
  This one is the real REAL Dvorak:
  http://twitter.com/THErealDVORAK

• George W Bush
  http://twitter.com/ThePresident
  One of a great many fake GW accounts
  Last update a month ago, 284 followers

• Henry Rollins
  http://twitter.com/HenryRollins
  6,587 followers
  The person who runs this account mostly just tweets quotes from Rollins’ books. I’m not sure why any sane person would want to impersonate the ex Black Flag front man, especially considering the ramifications if he ever finds you. Ouch.

• Robert Mugabe
  http://twitter.com/robmugabe
  The internet barely worked in Zim before the elections, so I don’t think anybody would expect this to be the real Muggins. Says things like: “Thinking of shutting the electricity down for laughs”.
  109 followers
  Last update: 8 days ago

• Chuck Norris
  1943 Followers, last update 18 days ago
  http://twitter.com/chucknorris
  This one was inevitable I suppose.

• Lindsay Lohan
  http://twitter.com/lindsaylohan
  382 followers, last update 1 month ago

  A lot of these Paris Hilton types have fake profiles on Twitter, mostly just as link bate for trashy celeb sites.

• Darth Vader
  http://twitter.com/darthvader
  The dark lord is doing very well for himself in the micro blogging space with 8078 followers
  Last update 1 month ago.

• Older fake Twitter accounts, barely active…

  • http://twitter.com/DavidLetterman – 1247 followers, last tweet 10 months ago
  • http://twitter.com/billgates – 773 followers, last update 7 months ago
  • http://twitter.com/dickcheney – 54 followers, last update 8 months ago
    Says things like: “Won a baboon on eBay. Condition as-is, but I’m going to use the little guy for parts anyway. Never know when the ticker might blow a valve.”
  • http://twitter.com/chavez – last update 2 months ago, 359 followers

Anybody know of any other fake Twitter accounts worth outing? If you’re ever suspicious or unsure about a profile, its always worth checking it out on Summize to see what other users are saying.

I suppose the trend to jump the follower queue based on the clout of an appropriated reputation will continue for the forseeable future. Its a little easier to get away with considering the cheap, quick and superficial nature of Twitter usage.

I wonder if we are going to see the Twitter equivalent of the Facebook fan page, with popular personalities having the accounts managed by their pr companies. I guess this is already happening at the political level and Barack Obama is a good example of this, although it should be said that his updates to have a genuine tone to them.

If Twitter can sort out its architectural issues and continue to scale the twitterjacking phenomenon going to be one to watch. I don’t think it will go away in the immediate future, its just going to get a bit more sophisticated.

During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

- I’d forgotten how good (and insightful – circa 1999) this essay by Adams was, until I found it again today on another very clever person’s blog. Josh Porter used the passage to open his new book, which is flying off Amazon’s pixel-powered shelves right now.

He also has two great new CRM-pertinent posts that relate to a recent Audi project (access is unfortunately for Audi drivers only).

The site is the work of, in the words of ReadWriteWeb, “Marketing consultant and web connoisseur” Noah Brier. It only went live on Friday and yesterday (Monday) he reported having received over 77,000 tags already – quite a sample of data for one weekend.

Results for familiar brands

This all seemed a bit arbitrary until I started surfing through the results pages.

Here’s the feedback for Volkswagen so far. If you’re seeing what I’m seeing, the beetle is still the main product they’re known for, and a certain genocidal maniac is still casting quite a large shadow over the public brand perception.

Toyota seems more consistent but not particularly exciting

BMW, Audi (whose logo seems to trigger some confusion around the Olympics) and Mercedes are some more German car brands, all with similar yet varying associations.

Here’s Wikipedia
Netflix and
Starbucks.

Generally the online brands seem to be fairing better than the offline ones (note: I do not include Microsoft or AOL in this), not sure if thats because of the people who’re using this thing or if there’s just a bit of a halo around online services at the moment.. probably a combination of both of those factors. Judging by the slanguage used most of the users are from the US, with some british contributions coming through (quite a few “wankers” thrown around).

Interestingly Yahoo have quite a bit of negative feedback.

Personally I associate Yahoo more with their cooler online community acquisitions than with their admittedly boring portal heritage, but that seems to be where most of the feedback is coming from.

I wonder what the potential for gaming this is and how long it will take the brand managers and PR people to catch on to it?

Here’s where you can contribute to the data.

This service will enable social features on any website with the addition of a snippet of code. Subscribers will be able to pick and choose from a menu of functionality, including member registration, invites, members galleries, reviews and third party OpenSocial applications.

Here’s a video demo of Google Friend Connect being added to a site. The guy narrating this thing sounds totally blown on some kind of heavy Mountain View hydro.

Do OpenID / Google / Facebook stuff on any site

Users who have OpenId’s or Google accounts will be able to log in to Friend Connect widgets anywhere they find them, allowing you to, for example, interact with Facebook friends, check your gmail, pushing data to or pulling it from the parent web application.

So, as I understand it, even if you’re visiting a Friend Connect enabled website for the first time, and the site has for argument’s sake an Orkut or a Facebook widget, you’ll be able to interact with that set of friends immediately without leaving the site. I guess this is a major step in the direction of the web becoming a more open platform for social interaction.

A downside to all this is that Friend Connect widgets will apparently run in iFrames, meaning that activity isn’t really even taking place on the host website. This means you don’t have direct access to the stats around how your users interact with Friend Connect features.. unless of course that access is provided by Google through Google Analytics or a similar interface.

Myspace and Facebook: A wider trend towards openness

Combine this with Myspace and Facebook’s very recent moves in the direction of Data Portability, and there is a huge emerging trend here towards openness on the social web, and ultimately the realisation of the “web as a platform” ideal. What this means is the potential to run any app on any website with any network of friends.

Google Friend Connect demo

There is currently a demo of an embedded Friend Connect iLike application on musician Ingrid Michaelson’s site. You basically log in in the popup, and you can rate her music, add it to your iLike profile, basically all the usual iLike functionality you might use in your iLike Facebook app.

Very cool and I can definitely see how this is going to benefit people like musicians who want to get off the whole institutionalised marketing merrigoround and start doing things for themselves.

Sounds like good news all round for the web as a whole.

Update: Here’s a video of the Friend Connect announcement

Via Scobleizer

Update: Just heard via TechCrunch that Facebook will not be open to Friend Connect traffic. Sounds very much like cutting off the face to spite the other stuff. Bad news for Zuckerberg, his company and in the shorter term, until the social landscape reorganises itself, the rest of us.

I think this is really a sign of weak leadership from Mark Zuckerberg. External pressures are no doubt huge for him and I think they have gotten to him this time round.

Cool spotters is a Tech Crunch endorsed startup that not only shows you the pics of who’s wearing what or driving this that and the other thing, they get their users to tag the stuff in the photos.

The result is a collection of gawker stalker snaps that is contextualised by the material goods therein. With this dynamic the shop window effect of a papparazi picture becomes totally overt as a means to making sure you are ahead of the curve with your wardrobe or whatever the thing on display happens to be – the Iron Man R8, or Paris Hilton’s ray bans.

The site allows you to track the products and celebrities of your choice so as to keep up to date with the particular style trajectories that interest you.

I think this concept is going to really take off for them, very interesting. The affiliate marketing potential here is massive.

Check it out.

This new chat direction might be quite a killer app, closing the communication loop for them. Unfortunately it only runs in the browser window at the mo, with a utility bar tacked on above the browser status bar using some kind of footer stick css.

If Zuckerberg et al can get this thing supporting jabber and whatever other IM protocols are out there, they can really get FB out there in the fight for desktop / mobile social networking ubiquity, particularly if somebody hooks the service into gps on mobiles. That way you not only know which of your friends are online, but where they are, and have them immediately available to talk to.

Something else they must surely be working on is the facility to host multi-user IRC-style chat rooms. If this could somehow be integrated thread-like into your wall, it would be an awesome replacement for the old broken telephone wall post methodology that we have now. Ahem. not that I use Facebook any more… much.