Someone's massive Twitter following is simply a large list of links to follow up on...and determining their fakeness is algorithmically but who has the time to check each follower's activity level? Most social media "professionals" I know have no clue except to trust a paid-for black box analysis service.

And many well-accepted Wikipedia articles have plenty of dead links in their footnotes, even though such cruft should be easy to red flag. What's harder to diagnose are footnotes that refer to information in print. If I told you that, among my accomplishments, the story of how I built my fortune is referred to on pages 106-118 of one of Malcolm Gladwell's early, more obscure titles...how many Wikipedia editors would bother to look that up? Or maybe I just make up a book and enter in a random ISBN.

It's still all-to-easy to avoid examination by promising that the original source of the info is just one click away. As long as you don't inspire anyone to vet you out of jealousy or spite, you could go undetected for a long while, despite the power of the hyperlink

Its not that hard. We have a search engine which does it all day and all night, billions and billions. But it does make people less willing to engage. I've speculated for a while now that you could do a twitter equivalent of hellbanning where people who were hellbanned saw their robot followers but people who were considered 'legit' saw the number that twitter actually thought were people. If you just blow away the bot followers then the people who have them will be disillusioned and not actually use twitter or point people at it, so it is in Twitter's interest to have them out their pushing the story 'follow me on Twitter, everyone else does!' even if that is fake. Hopefully those people will find someone real to follow and become customers.

He could have at least tried to do something with this alter ego to test if his manufactured "fame" could withstand the slightest bit of human scrutiny. Instead, all he proved is that websites like Kred use faulty algorithms to measure social media influence.

At least we learned one thing, though: Kred is preying on giant companies like Procter & Gamble and Budweiser that still can't grasp the concept of social media.

Obviously if put to the test, the crack experts on the internet could see through his BS via Google, but the people you would try to leverage being internet famous with tend not to be internet savvy -- hence his point about the large multinational companies getting suckered into kred.

So he's internet famous but not internet famous?

> . . .but convincingly appears so. Obviously if put to the test, the crack experts on the internet could see through his BS via Google

And it's convincing but not convincing?

I think you're being extremely generous by saying it would take an "expert" to see through his paper-thin facade.

"Santiago Swallow may be one of the most famous people no one has heard of."

Fame is based on how many people knows you. If no one knows your name, your not famous. If the Santiago setup doesn't generate new followers on Twitter, the tactic isn't very successful.

From my point of view, Santiago Swallow is (was) a very static Twitter account that haven't come to life.

To call a thing like this successful, there has to be other, external forces giving life into the persona. From what I can see, everything about Santiago comes from the creator, not from anyone else.

The premise of the article is thought-provoking, but slightly invalid. A few things:

- Like all fakes, they eventually get caught.

- Maintaining fame is a lifelong journey.

- As places like twitter get more and more saturated the less likely "10,000+" followers will matter.

- You only have one thing in this world, your reputation. If you screw it up by buying fake followers, you have 10 times more of the work you require to naturally build reputation in order to climb out of the hole you've put yourself in.

What would be REALLY interesting is to see what kind of money Santiago Swallow generated from his "internet fame".

From a logically consistent point of view, how can you even prove that? Nobody except those "in the game" would be able to know about fakes that didn't get caught ever. So it's a bias fallacy: you only ever get to hear about fakes that GET caught.

Second, even if we are to believe that all "eventually get caught" what does it matter? If the "eventually" is 2-10 years, that's enough time to do a lot of damage, fool people, etc. It's as if saying "Crime is no biggie, because eventually all criminals get dead".

>- Maintaining fame is a lifelong journey.

If you want to maintain it for a lifetime, yes. If you only want some time in the spotlight, no. Why would a troll or con-artist care to maintain "lifelong fame"? He wants to get something out of the fake identity, it's not like it's his real life.

>- You only have one thing in this world, your reputation. If you screw it up by buying fake followers, you have 10 times more of the work you require to naturally build reputation in order to climb out of the hole you've put yourself in.

Doesn't matter for people that bought the fake followers and didn't get caught. Or whatever similar fake-generation system they used in another medium.

Fair point, but I suspect the only way this discussion ends in an philosophical debate about perception vs reality.

My overall point is what is end-goal objective for someone who would implement such a technique? To make money? The author is suggesting that it's easier and cheaper building your personal brand (and thus reap benefits) than to work hard organically. Furthermore that we should be concerned that it is possible. My perspective is "So what? These people are running very risky lives and will get caught. Even if they don't, they still live carrying a massive burden of risk". Social network have equally positive and negative powers associated with them.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

As an experiment, count up the number of distinct people (that're following you back) that you've had twitter conversations with in the past 60 days.

The tweet-per-day rates for these accounts roughly follow a power law, going by a mix of sampling individual accounts and observing my own TL. A decent number are known to be real but look essentially abandoned(from a follower's perspective - they may be lurking). At the other end some top 200 tweets per day. The middle of the curve is at around 4-5 TPD.

These accounts do not all treat Twitter uniformly, of course. Some broadcast their personal updates to work or life. Some of them ask questions. Some are posting bon mots. By far the most popular activity is commentary on news items, though. Because I follow so many accounts I also see a substantial subset of semi-private conversations, which usually appear from the commentary tweets.

Now: Is this valuable? The technical restrictions mean it doesn't replace email or regular blogging, but I see a lot of serendipitous conversations that can't occur in other contexts(too much overhead). This is nearly ideal for creative types, and I believe that is what's making them gravitate to it.

and

many have replaced it with texting.

Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.

Really wish people didn't require that to let me read some text.

They also want to show you their ads (which are JS based) and put some bread on their tables.

They could make them plain images or text, but why bother (and work extra) for the insignificant number of JS-disabling people? Not to mention that those same people are likely to block ads anyway...

So, no JS, no service.

Now, that's for Google, but anyway, ATM, I think, Google is the only search engine that matters.

http://qz.com/74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-ev...

As a user of Lightroom since version 1 in 2007, and spending many hundreds of hours using it as my main image-editing program on 40,000+ images since then, it would be my last choice of imaging software to "mash[] up three portraits"

I'm not sure if it's even possible to combine multiple images in Lightroom; it's more for making global adjustments to single images. There might be a way to do it using a third-party plugin, but most Lightroom functions work on the whole image (adjusting exposure, white balance, etc). There are some cloning and healing tools, but as far as I know, there's no way to clone a nose out of one portrait and paste it into another.

Even if it's possible, it's not something that a first-time user would be able to do in the author's two hour window on April 14th after downloading the free trial, especially given all his other activities.

Maybe the author is just trying to CYA for using someone's picture he found online, but if that part is clearly exaggerated, maybe he's just trying to become "internet famous" by making up a made-up "internet famous" alter-ego, or something more meta- like that.

Certainly this is just a matter of looking at the followers, seeing how old those accounts are, how long they've been tweeting, and coming up with some sort of normalized score?

I understand there's a ton crawling, but certainly doable. Or am I overlooking something?

I mean if you ignore the other 99% of TFA.

And I see so many people claiming themselves to be futurists, leaders blah blah..

I guess fake it 'till you (sorta) make it is not dead.

I think he had like 24k and now he has 19k.