In the early days of social networking, it was all about how many friends you have. Twitter changed all of that and now what matters is how many followers do you have.
The whole follower/following ratio is a great ego boost for many and post Twitter success, a lot of me-too sites have started coming up with similar terminology.
The problem?
Look at ibibo – they are adding followers to celebrities automatically, without even taking your approval.
I was recently added as a follower to some ‘Rahul Bhat’, an actor who I do not even know about [sorry dude!] and guess what, the actor’s profile has 0 following and 5868 followers (at the time of writing this article). Similarly, I was ‘forced’ to follow Shekhar Suman, who incidentally has 13K followers.
The celebrities will of course be happy about it [heck! its better than Twitter, where you actually have to either be super famous to attract followers, or really take the pains to start conversation] as it keeps the ego game on.
But what about user privacy violation?
What’s your opinion?
I am not aware of the iBibo service but I think there will be sufficient legal background fire on the privacy front. If it has the same twitter model, then the people I follow do not get any privileged access to my data. Nor do they follow me back i.e. get access to any updates that I might want to keep away from the crowd.
Some might even say, this is another form of unwanted advertising. Given that we are subjected to it all over the place, iBibo isn’t doing anything separate. And maybe they even have an “unfollow” button somewhere to give the excuse of user control.
More importantly, somebody needs to tell the celebrities that this is not good advertising for them. But given the names you have stated above, any publicity would probably be good publicity.
On iBibo’s product strategy, this is a surefire way of alienating any users they might have today. Or is there a segment of customers that prefers to get updates from/about random actors and does not know about or is not interested in twitter/FB?
@Sriyansa
This is no advertising. This is as good as performing action on the behalf of a user.
As good as sending out email from your email id.
To me, this is quite an unethical practice company has resorted to.
@Ashish reading your comment and going back to the post, I do agree with you …
primarily because the wording says “you are now following …” hence setting the context that it is a user initiated action.
Reset your password !
hahaha….. nothing new for ibibo.com….i can give you in writing that the company will never ever create any value or break even… its a co which is created to spend money…:)…..
@ Internet Guru
How can you confirm that the company will never create any value and has not reached the “Break even” stage.
As per me, Ibibo.com has been a hugely successful venture so far. An alexa rank of 27 speaks volumes about the firm.
Sudhir just a small exercise. Go get alexa tool bar installed on 50 PCs with your site as your home page and do the same with a few cyber cafes too by paying them some money. Your Alexa will shoot.
Next on ibibo I agree with Internet Guru, they have been doing such things (copying blogs from sulekha, fictitious friends on cafe etc etc.)
IGuru,
you seem stupid than Guru.. people sitting to do clicks to promote company ??? You are out of your mind .. I was trying to do for a web company … ten minutes I was bored to death and stopped the stupid method … NO USE …
Sallu
@ Sudhir…..
Alexa does not make a co successful… if it was the case i would have made tons of billion $ companies…
ibibo.com lacks…
1. Vision.
2. Strategy.
3. Structure/Process/Innovation
4. I do not want to comment on the skills they have..
5. They want to do anything and everything.. they lack focus and sense of business….
6. they do not know that a the purpose of business is to create value for the stakeholders.
If you call spending money and starting different verticals without serious vision or plan about what will be the future… what value it create… whats the purpose ….then they are successful….they do not have any business sense..
You can decide on yourself….( if you can find out… please find out what is net cash outflow of ibibo.com is and when are they planning to get cash positive
…)
* i am not a Past or present employee or anyway related to ibibo.com
Sudhir,
The concept of Facebook was copied from a small co owned by an Indian girl .. the owner of FB use to work for her !! You mean to say the Indian girl didnt planned and the FB guy planned so that he is successful ??? Sorry buddy .. you dont know which business will be successful …
Sallu
Do people even use Ibibo? What are their numbers like – in terms of total users and users active per month?
Alexa India Rank 27. So definitely some traction is there. But mostly thru huge ad spends.
There are companies who provide this kind of service on twitter. Check out http://www.tweecha.com/.
we are rocking hard in ibibo
its called fake ego message to this so called stupid celebrites!
only some unsecure people’s brain child – idea
and it is advertising, advertising to the other so called celebrities!
Any company that violates the Default setting of Opt Out automatically is shooting itself in the foot. It may be legal but certainly unethical and annoying to members to have some idiot’s postings automatically in your list even if you don’t care for that person!
The most disgusting thing that is happening in Twitter is that many of the celebrities with large following are being paid by product companies to shill their product or service. Yuck!
If you are going to do it, do it very slyly as Chris Brogan shills a carry on bag and the video camera that shot this video with. Long term – this ain’t going to work , even though the comments show some idoitic wide-eyed naivetes!
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-new-carry-on-eagle-creek-tarmac-22/