Some recent searches have revealed unusual activity on twitter, and I wonder where it's going. Narcissus searches on twitter reveal a variety of accounts tweeting links into my blog and sites, for reasons not clearly apparent.

For example, a week ago, a half dozen identical twitter accounts all tweeted my post about electric cars playing music. All the accounts had pictures of models as their icon, and the exact same set of twitter posts, which seem to be a random collection of blog and news URLs with a bit.ly pointer to the item, all posted via twitterfeed. These accounts seem to follow and be followed by about 500, presumably the same list.

Here are some of the accounts:

• anaamaris
• aleighagreek

Then more recently I see another set of accounts which all follow about 20 people but are followed by about 200 to 500. They are all posting "from API" and again are just posting links, this time with tinyurl.com. The account names are odd, too.

• sheen0uz
• http://twitter.com/moshelir3u
• http://twitter.com/felecin9v

These also seem to to have cute girls as icons. However, strangely, the many followers appear to be real, or at least some of them appear to be. Why are people following a spam robot? Are the followers people who were paid to do it, or are in some twitter-optimization scheme?

What I am curious about is the motive. Are they linking to real sites in the hope of gaining some sort of legitimacy in twitter indexing engines, so that later they can start linking to people who pay for it? (Twitter SEO?) Are they trying to form twitter equivalents of link farms? Are they just hoping that site authors will see the backlinks and look at them for some later purpose? (You would be amazed how many hits on a web server are there just to put a spammer in the "Referer" field, either to get you to look, or to show up in referer logs that some sites post to the web.)

Thoughts on what's up?