25 year old aspiring finance major and self-proclaimed geek.
Formerly Subversity.net
Two winters ago I left a position as a system administrator that was paying pretty well and moved cross-country to a region with less jobs than where I moved from. Three months later, I was still unemployed, broke, and bored. I was talking to my good friend Japhy on IRC one day and he was explaining to me how the tf-idf algorithm works. For reasons involving boredom more than any other reason, I dreamed up an idea: I would write software that would take a given document and generate book suggestions based on its content.
I think that most programmers would agree with me that we put in longer hours on code when we're not working for anybody. We don't stop learning, either. To us, unemployment is a brief sprint of academia spent in our home office, the local coffee shop, or our parent's house.
My imagination dreamed up this fairly straightforward process:
I had already written multiple Twitter bots by this time so I decided to just use some of my existing code to poll Twitter's search API. Essentially, the "documents" I mentioned above were actually tweets containing the terms "book" or "books." Two and a half days later I had a working prototype that could generate a book recommendation from a given tweet. It was at this time that I added steps 5 and 6:
Four months later and I had generated over $7,000 in sales for Amazon with over $400 commission for myself. Obviously, the commission I was making wasn't livable but it was a nice addition to my then-depleting savings. Had I decided to scale out my operation, I could have made much more. My benchmark is at four months because that's how long I went before being suspended. My conversion rate? 0.13%! While seemingly low, this number is very high when compared to email spam. However, it's important to note that email spam is subject to various filtering technologies.
A fair amount of the time I share this story, people are more impressed with the fact that I went 4 months before getting suspended. The truth is, I had a lot of throttling built into my spam bot. The factors I think are important to point out are:
While it only lasted a short while, I had alot of fun and made a little bit of money spamming Twitter.
The second re-incarnation of this project turned into BookSuggest, a website for recommending books based on a person's Twitter feed. I haven't put alot of effort into promoting it, but my conversion rate is much lower now that I'm not pushing the links in anyone's face.
Try it out and comment here - what did BookSuggest tell YOU to read?
25 year old aspiring finance major and self-proclaimed geek.
25 year old aspiring finance major and self-proclaimed geek.
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Comments 16 Comments
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/state-of-twitter-spam.html
It ultimately depends on how you look at it. My book recommendation bot actually had quite the following prior to it being suspended. Many users did not find it too obtrusive (on account of the anti-spam measures I built in) and enjoyed the recommendations. As a result, I guess I was never reported.
After all, I did go _4 months_ before Twitter even caught on.
However, you are right. If I was just spamming random URLs to anyone and everyone under the sun, I would likely have my affiliate account suspended and have to forfeit the funds.
I looked into the bug you reported and it has been fixed. Give it another shot and see what you think.
And yes, I'll definitely follow up with a post on my analytics since writing this article :)
But Sept 09 was the end of it all because they started filtering out trending topic posts to only include users who had some account history. They also started to very quickly banned the new accounts my bot created.
At first, I linked to eBay's affiliate program, which paid, but not as well.
I also built another bot that would create Twitter accounts with girl pictures. Then I found a list of porn stars on Twitter and used the API to gather a list of all the followers who followed porn stars. Then I would use those girl accounts to follow those people following porn stars and tried to get them to sign up for webcam shows. It didn't work that well but it did make decent money over time.