Imagine my excitement when I heard that Twitter is being overrun by robots.
“At last!” I thought to myself, “The robot uprising has begun!”
I was imagining something kind of like “The Terminator” and that Flight of The Conchords song set in “the distant future, the year 2000.” But my friend Mr C set me straight.
Apparently these robots don’t want to kill anyone. At least not yet. Instead, they spend their days trawling through the twitterverse for keywords. And these keywords are specified by companies (and motivated individuals) wanting to hook up with people who might need their services.
For example, the robot might be programmed to automatically follow anyone who mentions “auto insurance” or “personal injury” or to search for phrases such as “I wish someone could tell me how to make Big Money Fast!!” and “Don’t tell anyone but I really do suffer from embarrassing erectile dysfunction problems”.
So, all you have to do is innocently mention something like “lactating asian babes” on Twitter and you instantly get “auto-followed” by the Breastfeeding Association of East Anglia, The Chowking Chinese Food Chain AND @HotLesboticChicks69.
And yes, for the record, you can mention lactating asian babes innocently. I do it all the time, actually.
Sometimes, however, the link between what you’ve just tweeted and who suddenly starts auto-following you isn’t that clear.
Why, just the other day I found myself tweeting a lot about dead cats and seconds later a very buxom lass started following me, trying entice me to some “Adult Dating Site”. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why she’d appeared, unless, of course, she worked as a part-time pet mortician to supplement her adult “dating”.
“Now, hang on a moment, NDM” I can here some people say. “Let’s go back a little there. Why, exactly, were you talking about ‘dead cats’ on twitter?”
Sheesh, you people have to know everything. Can’t a girl retain some sense of mystery?
But if you really must know… (*sigh*)
You see, I’d signed up with a Twitter-based service called “Mr Tweet” to try and maximise my twitter exposure. You know, as part of my strategic plan to become an Internet Phenomenon like Susan Boyle, Perez Hilton and “The Keyboard Cat”.
Anyway, Mr Tweet analysed my twitter activity and concluded that there were dead cats that were more “engaging”. Okay, so that was my (wrong) interpretation of his report. But let’s just pretend, for the purposes of this post, that Mr Tweet’s exact words to me were: “NDM, frankly there are dead cats on twitter that are funnier than you”.
Understandably, I complained bitterly about this on twitter. I also complained about the fact Mr Tweet had recommended I follow Ashton Kutcher (Mr Demi Moore) above all others on Twitter.
What the…? Is Mr Tweet Ashton Kutcher’s bitch? My next tweet said something along the lines of:
Follow Ashton Kutcher? I say to Mr Tweet: “Over my dead cat’s body!”
And it was at this point that my well-endowed pet mortician friend started following me. Shortly after that I noticed my number of followers had dropped and I tweeted:
Someone stopped following me after those “dead cat” tweets. Don’t know who but must have hurt their felines… Yes, I am drunk.
And for the record: I wasn’t exactly drunk. Okay, so maybe I was just a little. But listen, I’m not the enemy here.
However I do appear to be the only person concerned that some evil genius out there has invented a robot to look out for the term “dead cat” so he (or she) can entice them into his pornographic adult XXX dating lair. And I strongly urge everyone with a twitter account to randomly include the tag #deadcat in their next tweet so that we might smoke him out of his hole once and for all.