That Vicariaus app you may have seen appearing in your Twitter feed via a small viral growth hacking got stuck on Twitter's automation rules. We talked about it after it started spamming my feed with "so and so added you to a list" and Twitter notifications states that the app is not compliant.
To be honest, they also said they "love him", but that he will have to find a different way of doing what he does.
"We love the fact that Vicari uses the lists to help people find new accounts to follow and get new perspectives. However, the way the app is currently doing this is in violation of Twitter's automation rules," he said. stated Twitter in a note. "We contacted them to find a way to make the app comply with our rules."
The app was created by Jake Harding, an entrepreneur who built it as a secondary project.
The app, which you can find here, enumerates the followers of a target account and creates a list from the accounts that follows. This allows you to create lists that are snapshots of the exact feed (less algorithmic tweak) that any given user sees when they open their app. Intriguing, right?
Well, it turns out that Twitter did this themselves twice before. Once in 2011 and originally waaaay in 2009. The product had an integrated feature that allowed you to click and view someone's followers graph as a feed with a tap.
I was there in 2009 when it was one thing, and I can tell you it was just nice to see someone else's chart go by. In the early days of growth it was very interesting to see who was following who or what. He taught you how to "make" Twitter when everyone was learning it together. I can understand why Harding wanted a duplicate of this to recreate this "snapshot" feeling of someone else's information system.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest side effects of the way Vicario duplicates this function using an automatic 'list builder' is that he spams every person he adds to the list since Twitter always warns you when someone adds you to a list and there is no current way to change that behavior.
So you see many tweets and notis "added to their list".
There are also other problems with the way Vicarious works to build public lists of people's follower charts. There is potential for abuse here as it could be used to target people following a targeted account. One of the main reasons why Twitter killed this feature twice is that everything seems extremely personal. Your Twitter follower chart is something you theoretically care for. Although many people have become more performing with the followings and instead, ironically, they add the people who want to "follow" to the lists.
Having your public chart is something that seemed exciting and connective at some point in Twitter's life. But the world may be too big and too ugly now for something like this to really feel comfortable if it spreads beyond the crowd of technorati / Twitter savvy users. We will see, I suppose.
Oh, and Twitter, the time has come for you to incorporate a 'can't be added to lists' feature. Otherwise, as someone reminded me via DM, you run the risk of making all the same Facebook mistakes.
