The mysterious #podpeople on Twitter - are they a network of autofollowers?

I found some strange people had ended up in my feed after I decided to go wild and follow-back anyone who followed me. I kept seeing the same phrases tweeted over and over again, in a very active feed, like a glitch in the matrix.

The phrases range from bland good mornings to zodiac + #swineflu ideas, to greetings in German. Check these searches, the same twitterers appear over and over again tweeting these phrases. Is this a twitbot-net, a twitter-worm, or some popular twitter helper application gone a bit nuts? Since a bunch of these involve retweeted links, I suspect a really big twitter spam network are faking being real people.

Is it sunny where you are?

你 好 吗?ni hao ma

Ever get a song stuck in your head?

Any favorite TV show?

Has any one else noticed this? It gets worse........ next year...... #swineflu

Apologies to Chinese for improper Zodiac sequence #swineflu

Do svidania til later...

We gotta find Jake tonight, and get this hit done. He’s probably over at the Beverly Hills hotel. ...

Ask questions to learn - that's twitter.

Learn Twitter basics, #hashtag use, whale hints, tweetDJ, #ishow http://bit.ly/10VIGw

Cosby Show 25th Anniversary

Let's share some music http://m.tearn.com

Italian for dumb, dumber, dumbest. Funny stuff.

buon giorno

Goooood Morning, Vietnam. Good day world

What's everyone talking about?

Guten tag, wie geht es ihnen!

iphone, tweets, ice cream.

Also spotted these, but they are useless for searching;
"Any plans for the day?"
"Random tweets"
"Enjoy a great day."

There's plenty more phrases in use, check ch_goodwin for an account without a single original tweet.

Update I just realized that tern Media is the prime suspect behind all of these tweeters right now as the "Italian for dumb" and gotta hit Jake" tweets start with their @Jamokies & @JimmytheJamokie accounts.

FYI , obviously I'm dabitch at twitter, less obvious is that I'm also most of the time adland at twitter (which also tweets anything posted on adland.tv).

Blog reactions

No reactions yet.