@PeterDrew’s Buggy Black-hat Software [The Beauty of Twitter]

Today, the best thing so far about Oprah joining Twitter impacted my life. Very succinctly, a spammer, black-hatter, and otherwise unsavory web character that goes by the name Peter Drew joined Twitter and started promoting his presence there with a vengeance, in an attempt to cash in on some of the Oprah-Twitter Mania.

The guy has ridden the bubbles throughout the years with the goal of pure exploitation.  When blogging turned into a phenomenal thing years ago, he wrote software that made splogging on a massive scale literally a click away.  When YouTube started making headlines, he created software that downloaded from people’s channels, and allowed you to re-upload it as if it were your own.

When the Google Knol came out, he wrote software that used the system for pure self promotion and SEO plays.

So now that Oprah is on Twitter and pushing it into the mainstream? Of course he’s pushing software that will somehow exploit the system in ways John Reese never dreamed of.

He’s calling his new thing “Brute Force Social Media,” which sounds about as antithetical to how social media works as it can possibly get:

To gain a lot of followers like I have, if you
know me, you know we automate everything we
do online that makes our lives easier.
see
http://www.brute[redacted]  to
start gaining tons of followers, so you
can start stamping out your content and
get your Voice online like never before.

Why is this a good thing?
Up until now, this winner among winners has been operating in the shadows.  I signed up to one of his sites years ago (during his blogging phase), because I had a large blogging network at the time (around twenty authors), and the software as it was described in the marketing verbage sounded like it would help me automate some of the routine maintenance I had to do.

Of course, once he had my email address, I was locked into his mailing list, and I received updates every time he figured out a way to game the system and defraud advertisers out of money by creating junk content, somehow.

Every email contains a link to unsubscribe, but any time I used it, it seemed like the emails I received from the man only multiplied. Instead of one email a week, I’d get three or four.

That he’s on Twitter, now, is great!  I can ask him flat out and in full view of the world why I can’t get off his mailing lists.

Sure, he’s probably doing a bit more damage to start with. He’s polluting the tubes with his nonsense, and folks are probably buying his junk (which is why he’s still doing it)…

… but since sunlight is the best disinfectant, I can’t imagine this continuing.  I’ve been on his mailing lists for at least four or five years, and I haven’t seen a single proposal from him that seemed on the up-and-up.

I ask again, Peter, in full view of the world – how do I get off your lists?