These are some of the absolute most annoying things about Twitter user practices. These are things that would ultimately drive me away from Twitter completely if I wasn’t so tied to the multitude of REAL users I have between my 3 accounts (yes, 3–They all serve their purpose). In no particular order:

1. Auto DM’s — I don’t care what they say. They’re annoying. It’s like calling someones house and repeatedly getting the answering machine, and to make matters worse, the answering machine message is terrible. Why bother even calling? *unfollows*. Get this: The other day someone sent me an auto DM that simply said “hey, how’s it going?” I genuinely thought it was a legitimate DM so I replied cautiously with “Good. How about yourself?” I never even got a reply back. Asshole.
2. The Unfollower — This has to be one of the absolute most irritating things ever. Those people that will follow you just to get you to follow them, and then immediately unfollow you to avoid reaching the limit for how many people they can follow. In other words “I want to make sure you receive my garbage tweets that advertise how you can make $54,887,684 a day with Twitter and gain 10 billion followers in 5 minutes; but I don’t give a shit in a hand basket about your tweets.” I always check to see who is actually following me back. If you follow me and then immediately unfollow me, you get unfollowed and blocked. I don’t care who you are. If you don’t value the tweets I post, then why should I even bother reading a single thing you post?
3. Zero Tweets — If you have zero tweets and are following 910 people, I will not follow you back, period. It’s pretty obvious that your auto-following rampage is in preparation for bottom-of-the-barrel, meaningless tweets about things nobody cares about. Besides, save yourself the trouble. Your account will probably get deleted within a day anyways.
4. Sleeper Tweets — These ones can be sly but if you’re paying attention, you can pick them up. These are the bot accounts (and sometimes human) that will try and slip their spam tweets into a barrage of seemingly harmless, although meaningless, tweets. Stuff like “Listening to music…”, “Just finished watching ____” and I’ve even seen some do @replies to users that were never even talking to them in the first place. I’ve been fooled by some of these before but the ones that got me were actually run by humans. As soon as I see that “Get 300 followers in a day” tweet, you are gone. Some of the bot accounts can be funny though. I’ve seen some say that they’re watching a television show that isn’t even on anymore. The other day I saw one say that it was watching the Red Sox play and this was a few days after the Sox were eliminated by the Angels (fuckin’ Halos).
5. The RT Whore — Okay, you find something interesting posted by a friend and you want to RT it and make sure your friends see it. Fair enough. That’s harmless. Doing this all day long is annoying. If all you’re going to do on Twitter is pedal everything that someone else posted before you, then you should…just stop doing it. Post some original content. It’s not that hard. If all I see in your Twitter stream are RT’s, you’re getting unfollowed for being unoriginal and late.
6. Web Host Comparison Bots — This is a personal annoyance for me because I encounter these often due to my field of work. The Twitter user that @replies people with links to web hosting provider comparisons and recommendations. I especially loathe these because they act like they’re your friend or something. Like you were looking for web hosting and voilá, there they are to help you out. This is annoying in 2 parts though: 1.) I was never even looking for web hosting to begin with, so stop soliciting me. 2.) Those web host comparison sites are always a scam. It’s been proven that the majority of the web hosting top 10 list websites give out their spots on the list based on either the amount of money you pay for the listing fee, or how much you pay to be an “affiliate”. Base your web hosting reviews on human experience.

And there you have it. A short list of some of the worst things you can encounter on Twitter. Got your own to add? Post a comment or contact me.

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1. People who don’t wipe down the machines after they use them. I love having to wipe down a machine before AND after because the sweaty ass lady before me was too lazy to do it.
2. People who mull around the machine you’re on and occasionally stare at you as if to say “are you FINISHED yet?” Look, lady. I’m trying to complete my 4 sets with a minute of rest in between. I’m sure you can go find another machine to use in the meantime. GTFOH.
3. People who sing loudly with headphones on when they have no singing capabilities whatsoever. I encountered 3 of these yesterday, all of which were completely out of tune. It was like American Idol tryouts.
4. People who walk dangerously near or around the machine you’re on while you’re using it. I had this old guy almost get hit in the ribs once while I was on the leg press. He walked next to the foot plate as I was pushing out.
5. People who don’t put the weight pins in properly and end up bending them. I can point out like 3 or 4 machines at the gym I attend where you can’t use the weight increment add-ons (the 5lb, 10lb, etc.) on the side because someone put the pin in half way and then used the machine before realizing the pin is sticking out. Ugh.

There you have it. My gym pet peeves. What are yours? Please feel free to comment and let me know. I’m curious to see what everyone encounters at the gym.

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I'm vulgar. Call someone who cares.

With the huge rise in social networking popularity across the web, “social media” and whatever other bullshit buzz word the next “guru” has coined; comes the huge influx of people hopping on the bandwagon as the next self-proclaimed savior to the mediasphere-addicted masses. I’m really at my wit’s end with the amount of “professionals” bombarding me on Twitter with crap like:

“10,000 followers in one month!”

“How to make money with Twitter!”

“Make money at home!”

Ugh, just shut the fuck up already (sorry, late warning but this post has vulgarity). We get it. You’re some elite genius who has risen from the ashes of MySpace and other half-assed, master-minded, millionaire-making mounds of shit – otherwise known as social networks. Alright, fair enough. Everyone has to have an angle, right? Sure, whatever. You’ll tell me anything if you think it will sell me.

Okay, you’re burnt out at your bland desk job. Like a lot of savvy web users, you’re always using things like Facebook, Twitter, Brightkite, etc. You think to yourself,

“Man, I’m pretty snazzy when it comes to this social networking stuff. Look at all the people I’ve got following me on Twitter! I must be on to something…”

That’s when it hits you. You’re going to write a book and then build a website, maybe even start doing videos promoting your new techniques and start holding seminars. It’s going to be AWESOME! YOU’LL BE A MILLIONAIRE IN NO TIME! There’s a huge flaw in this idea though: 10 million other annoying people have thought of the same exact idea. Those same 10 million people are currently shoving their idea in peoples faces in the form of tweets on Twitter or whatever the hell else there is out there.

YTMND

The one that annoys me the most are the ones that are always talking about how you can gain 10,000 followers in a week or whatever insane time frame they lay down. Of course you know if the first guy said a month, the next guy with the same brilliant, original idea is going to say 1 week. Whatever happened to quality over quantity? I really have respect for the Twitter users that have built up their following by putting in the sweat and tears required. More power to them. They’re obviously interesting people and thus others want to hear what they have to say.

Quality vs. Quantity

But then there’s those users that do absolutely nothing but push theirs and other peoples “make money fast” products, and rehash links/material/etc that someone else put hard work into creating. The ones that just RT (ReTweet) the crap out of anything they think people will read. There’s no originality in any of it. It makes sense on some degree. For example, if you’re selling a product that you’ve really put your heart and soul into and people really love it, then sure, bombard us about it. But if you’re some self-proclaimed social media guru who just goes around tooting his/her own horn, posting crap people have read 300 times over from another source, then please go away. Find a new angle (there’s that word again!) and GTFOH (you’ll have to figure this abbreviation out on your own).

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This picture is completely irrelevant.

We received an email the other day at work from someone trying to sell a URL for a bloated price. It’s a pretty common practice and I’m sure any web designer reading this has encountered it at least once or twice in their career. Companies or individuals that solely make a living off of buying and selling domain names. Fair enough.

This latest method was kind of comical and at the same time it was clever; in a dirty, annoying care salesman kind of way. It starts off like you would expect. “I see that you are the owner of [DOMAINNAME].org…” blah, blah, blah, and then it goes on to the sender talking about how they have ownership of the same domain but in .com format. “Sounds awesome! How much are you sel….50 bucks??” (well, it didn’t really go down like that but I had to make this less boring). To be fair, $50 was a whole lot lower than what I expected the “seller” to want for it. Usually they get greedy.

Out of curiousity, my colleague decided to open up Terminal and run a whois on the domain, just to see if we could get some insight on this “company”. This is the kicker: the domain was available for purchase. So what happened next? I’m sure you’ve already figured it out for yourself, smarty pants. My colleague purchased the domain for 8 bucks. He even had a discount code! Following his victory, he proceeded to send back a response to the aforementioned email. It went something like:

“Thanks for the heads up on the domain”, “We’ve purchased it…”

Hilarity ensued. We never received a reply (wow, shocker) but between me and him we found it to be pretty hilarious in a nerdy kind of web guy way.

In your face!

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Ring, ring!

As I’m sure plenty of you have done I added my phone numbers to the “do not call” list long ago. Doing so has since served me well and I haven’t received any solicitation calls of any sort at home. Peace and quiet! Until now.

I received a phone call that came from a company with “research” in their name. Caller ID saved me the headache of having to listen to the stupid recording that followed. Basically the culprit identifies themselves as a “marketing research” company and the message even goes as far as to say that they are legally allowed to contact various people because it is not a solicitation; and also that they represent other large companies. To be removed from the call list they provide you with a completely separate phone number to call, which I’m sure is a call center armed with employees waiting to ask you a bunch of questions.

Fail or Win?

Who knows? I may be completely off and they may very well be a legit marketing research company simply gathering information for large corporations and nothing more. Solicitation-esque phone calls are probably not the best way to accomplish this. Being in an industry that relies heavily on marketing and campaigns, I’d probably be more than happy to answer a few simple questions. Getting a call from a recording is not going to get me to do so.

Talk Warranty to Me…

While we’re on the topic of mischievous phone messages and calls, the worst ones of all are the illegitimate vehicle warranty companies.  I’m sure you know the ones I’m referring to. They call you up and pose as the warranty department for whatever dealer you purchased your vehicle from. I’m pretty sure they prey on those who have recently paid off their vehicle, are about to or otherwise. It seems like these phone calls have sloped off considerably though, which is great because I’m pretty darn sure my 6-year-old Ford Ranger is way out of warranty and I really don’t care.

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