Twetiquette question: Mass adding friends?

[j2xl]

Hello,

I apologize if this is going to the wrong list, but I don't know who
else I should send this to.

Lately I've started receiving notices that I'm being befriended by
people I don't know. This is fine with me; I've seen this happen on
LiveJournal and I don't mind it. More recently, though, I've seen a
particular bot spidering people's lists of friends and adding everyone
as a friend. This bot, Forecast, clearly has contact information
posted, but its only purpose for befriending people is to beg people
to send it messages.

Does this bot's behavior fall afoul of the Twitter ToS's prohibition
on spamming users? Forecast's owner already has dozens of bot
accounts reserved, and I fear a swarm of "followers" who serve no
otherwise practical purpose.

Thanks,
--
Jason

[gtcaz]

I was added by this bot as well, and considered it my first twitter
spam.

If it doesn't violate the tos, perhaps they should be changed.

[Rguy84]

I assume this was some sort of sponsored bot. Because if you look at
forecast's page it has special parameters that you use to talk to it.
You could only make parameters if you had access to the back end...

[Uldis Bojars]

Hi, Jason!

One-direction subscription is a part of what twitter is - anyone can
become your follower. "Add as a friend" on Twitter actually means "I
want to subscribe to this person's twitters" and does not claim that
you actually know the person and are his friend.

There are no guarantees that people who follow you know you (or that
they don't add everyone on twitter as their friends). But - does it
harm you that someone listens to you? It's not like they are sending
something to you.

You may actually be interested to get in touch with people listening
to you - "never underestimate the strength of weak ties" - the
difference with bots is that there's no point in getting it touch with
a bot.

P.S. Having said that it'd be better if bot owners did not do this.
Word of mouth should be enough to get people to follow services like
Forecast, if they are good.

Best,
Uldis

[ http://captsolo.net/info/ ]

[Alex Payne]

Uldis gave a great summary there, but I'd like to add an "official"
response.

At this point in time, there are NO "sponsored" bots on Twitter.
There are bots that our developers have written on their own time,
and there are bots whose owners we've helped out with questions, but
nobody gets preferential access to our backend services. Everyone is
talking to the same API.

In the case of the forecast bot, it's just using the direct_message
API features in a clever way. No magic, no preferential treatment.
It's our intention to keep bots useful, reasonable, and not spammy.

--
Alex Payne
Obvious
http://twitter.com/al3x