Twitter Shuts Down Fame, The Follower Lottery
It was fun while it lasted. The company says the game, which gave thousands of followers to a new winner every day, violates “the spirit of [its] TOS.”
Here’s how Fame worked: Everyone who signed up for the service joined a follower pool. Every 24 hours, for 24 hours, this pool was given to a new person. The hope was to amass millions of followers — more than Gaga, was the line — so that each new winner would be actually famous for a day. Cool, right? A gimmick, but a clever one.
The first question we had for founder Adam Ludwin when he told us about Fame was: will Twitter seriously allow this? The answer was yes. For 19 days.
So! Fame is shutting down tomorrow. It has 8501 followers. It will have had 20 winners before shutting down, and inspired exactly one imitator.
Our 15 min are up. Well, 19 days to be exact. Twitter has informed us that we are violating the spirit of their TOS.
— FAME (@fame) April 12, 2012
So on this Friday the 13th we say farewell. We may be down, but we're not out. There's nothing like a good celebrity comeback story.
— FAME (@fame) April 12, 2012
HOT ON
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The Angry Luddite a year agoWas hoping to see a Buzz followup on this. It was certainly an interesting experiment. I’ve been following since it started, and a lot of the winners were about as interesting as a bag of rocks. Nevertheless, it was always interesting to see who would be next, and what they had to say. Today’s was a recent brain surgery patient who once opposed Obama - until ‘Obamacare’ essentially saved his life. I wonder if FAME getting shut down is due in part to the Twitter spam crackdown? Either way, their Twitter account now says they’re gearing up for Fame 2.0, so it’ll be interesting to see what that is all about.
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