SPAM ALERT! Twitter’s Follow Unfollow Reaches Google Plus, A Bot To Circle 2500 People Per Hour

by Leplan on July 20th, 2011 5

Robert Norris Hills becomes the latest Whistle Blower. He hacks (I wouldn’t say, it’s hack too. Google Plus seems to allow crawling) the Google Plus system and builds an Application that can put 2500 people into the circle and remove them if they don’t return the favor. He posts a note and video on his Google Plus account and hopes that Google takes it in good note and not ban him.

Here’s the video where Norris circles 5000 of Robert Scoble‘s friends.

Thought from the Bot and Video Maker (as posted on G+)

BOT ALLOWS 2500 FRIEND/Circle ADDS/HOUR

Please re-share this post so we can get something done about this before business accounts go live next week, or we are going to be over-run with crap……

SPAM Alert SPAM Alert SPAM Alert SPAM Alert
SPAM Alert SPAM Alert SPAM Alert SPAM Alert

So I was wondering why I was getting so many god damn adds/day from people who not only had no pages in common with me, but didn’t speak my language.

I did a few Google searches and found nothing regarding any new bots for G+…..So I decided to sit down and try and figure out what was going on myself, learnt a quick programming language and setup a bot to circle people.

I have NO idea how to program. Yes I’m relatively cluey, and I know my way around a PC but a programmer I am not.

The more I thought about it the more it made sense:
a) Make an account.
b) Add 5000 people to a circle.
c) Wait 24 hours for them to add you to a circle.
d) Remove circle (keeping the ones that had circled you).
e) Run bot again to fish for another 5000 people.

This is a MASSIVE problem. For me to add the # of people I am in the below video without even hitting a captcha screen, well….lets just say its AN ISSUE

Once you open up business accounts next week people will be doing this for $$ with nothing to throttle the spam ^^

I KNOW on its first jump that this will reach a few Google employees and I sincerely hope they look at fixing this because I love this service and leaving such a gapingly HUGEEE hole open is IMO a bad idea.

If you’re reading this and you’re one of my botted friends, I sincerely appologise for the spam.

I picked on +Robert Scoble in this video because he has a fair bit of clout on here (and had almost the perfect number of friends in his circle for me to hit 5k).

I also realise posting this puts my membership at jepordy. But I hope I’m treated as a whistle blower rather then a criminal.

Go soft guys. Lubes back there.

My Thought

I think, there is no reason to ban this guy. There isn’t any necessity to stop this process too. This reminds me of the biggest personal branding war that once happened on Twitter. People used follow-unfollow tactics to get the number of followers high. This phenomena will give people to a means to play with Google Plus and with time they will learn to use for their own benefit, and ultimately fall in love with the product.

Google can learn from Twitter’s early days promotion because of personal branding war. Most of the news on Twitter were about it. People slowly realized that there is no benefit in having huge number of fans when there is no engagement and relationship building, and the phenomena died.

Google can give time for people to learn and use the platform, and obviously banning the folks who do it is out of question. This circle-uncircling behavior might turn into a spam nightmare though, and Google can put a check into it. The checks can be like -not allowing people from adding more than 50 or 100 in a day.

Any Social Network has to be fun to use. It has to fulfill people’s hunger for fame and branding, also keeping the spamming behavior in control. LinkedIn and Facebook has managed it well, and I can see the courage of Facebook in not banning users who violate their TOS. Facebook just bans business pages and limits the users behavior to minimal service use in case of TOS violations. This has kept those spammers within FB, not letting them go away or spam. It’s remarkable.

If Google Plus follows Twitter’s path of banning users right or left or controlling too much like Apple by directing what people can do and what they can’t, we will basically not need a Google or Google Plus.

Let’s see how tactfully Google solves this problem.

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