Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

What fun is building a following on Twitter if you can't parlay it into a high-stakes game of chance? Such us the premise of betyourfollowers.com, a mashup app/social experiment by a small SF-based collective. The idea is simple: you pick five of your Twitter followers and gamble them in a head-to-head battle with someone you follow. You win, you pick up five new followers. You lose, your friend picks up five new followers. (There's even talk of a "Bet Them All" option - which could mark the end for more addictive personalities such as mine.)

"Isn't this a violation of Twitter's Terms of Service or API usage guidelines?" you may ask. To head off such debate, BYF launched in mid-August with an open letter to Twitter:

"We realize that Bet Your Followers isn't your typical Twitter app. We created it to examine new behaviors and explore the value of Twitter relationships. The reason we made an app that lets people risk their followers was to pose the question: If a mass of Twitter followers constitutes social currency, can it be gambled and exchanged like real currency?

We've been enthusiastic Twitter users since the early days and we genuinely value Twitter as a social service (not to mention as a lovely API -- thank you!). Our own followers are dearly important to us. But as Twitter grows, we've watched the race to accrue followers become a strange obsession. Whenever a sizeable group believes something to be sacred, it historically falls to artists, scientists, and hackers to question and play with that assumption. It is with this curious spirit that we created Bet Your Followers. It was also a lot of fun to make.

We realize our efforts could be construed as a violation of your API Terms of Service but we hope you see the value in our exploration of these issues. We'd love it if you sent us a d-message before giving us the boot, if you're even thinking of that -- of course, we would never risk unfollowing you :-)"

As Twitter becomes an arms race of "Who's got the most followers?" and spammers pollute the social airwaves, Bet Your Followers hopes to tap a nerve. BYF could be indicative of a trend in social downsizing. Or it could just be good for a laugh...only time will tell.

But it does revel in one universal Twitter truth: everyone's got followers to spare. We just didn't have anything to do with them prior to now. Will you be partaking in this kind of social downsizing?

Sam Cannon