Adulterating twitter

Twitter is a simple yet very powerful platform for sharing status updates among the followers. At first its intention was for personal uses, but now it’s beyond personal, it’s being used for spreading business updates. Already the total number of twitter followers of a website is considered for the valuation of its traffic. The more followers you have the more value your website gains. To get more followers you need to follow more people.

To follow the followers of a popular person/website go to the “followers” page (for example the followers page of php_projects is http://twitter.com/php_projects/followers). On each page you’ll see 20 people. There you’ll see the follow button (a human head with + symbol) beside each follower. Click on that button and you’ll become a follower of that person. Twitter uses ajax for this action. So you can simultaneously click on all the follow buttons on that page. When you target to follow a large number of people your wrist will get stuck clicking on the follow buttons.

But you can make this process fully automated! As twitter uses jquery, a simple one line of jQuery code can trigger click event on all the buttons at once. I’m not sure if twitter is aware of that or not. If you use FireBug you can run the code from console tab.

jQuery("li.follow-action button").trigger("click");

Also you can do it directly from address bar. Just paste this code in your address bar, press enter and see the magic!

javascript:jQuery("li.follow-action button").trigger("click"); void(0);

Screen shot of the code in action:

Hope you’ll find it useful for your business.

Related posts:

1. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter may face more sophisticated attacks in 2010
2. jQuery cycle plugin as carousel
3. AJAX and SEO – Is it possible to get them together?
4. jQuery “live” event