You really can’t buy friends

Are these ‘friends’ or followers that one would purchase just as names on a list, or are they real people who would actually read at least a few of your postings?

If the former, than it can only be ‘window-dressing’, but if this were a mechanism to allow you to put your stuff in front of 1,000 real people, you might think of that like a focus group or test market, to see who re-tweets or responds. For those many who are chasing ‘going viral’, this would seem to be a handy way to get some real feedback and ‘research’ their product, no?

That said, it just feels like a bad idea – just like real focus groups, only more so.