For the past couple of months I and others have had a massive surge in following numbers in not Twitter, but Yahoo! Meme. In my case, from under 50 followers to over 6000 with little content to warrant such following. I’d like to think I’m THAT popular but I’d be hallucinating. Even on Twitter my follower number is (right now) a tad under 3300

Many of us signed up to Meme almost a year ago to check out the scene, as you do with any new web service. While it’s a Tumblr clone almost feature for feature, it’s not backed by a proper mobile app which it really should have if Yahoo! was serious about it. Their mobile site only lets you post text updates, at least from smart phones. You couldn’t upload photos, videos or audio while on the go. Everything has to be from the desktop (or notebook). That lack of mobile access led me to pretty much abandoning the service until they decided to pick up the slack.

Now, about the surge, I’m not sure what’s going on but someone or some people seems to have created bot accounts to pump following numbers. I’m not sure if Yahoo! is paying attention to this (they must be, there are thousands of these), and if they are, whether they’re going to do anything about it. For all I know it could be Yahoo! itself either directly or indirectly, who knows?

On one hand it creates the illusion that they have a massive number of users, on the other, they’re inactive users adding no value to the community it purports to create. Either way, it’s not a good thing for Yahoo!’s fledgling social media effort.

For what it’s worth, I see more actual push for Koprol than Meme.