Friday, January 6, 2012

Follow Friday(?): Horse_ebooks

I'm going to be up front with you guys right now: I have no clue what's going on with @horse_ebooks on Twitter, but whatever it is, it's...something. The website that it lists in its profile seems to be a dump of ebooks about horses (naturally), but the actual Twitter feed is one of true majesty.

Every hour or so, a pearl of wisdom drops that cannot really be fully understood. When @horse_books tells us that "Most people know that AdSense isn t [sic] profitable anymore," we all may nod in solemn agreement. When @horse_ebooks informs us that "Knives should be sharpened and balanced with great care, and should then be," we all wait with bated breath to find out what is never to come next. The entire feed is filled with such sugar cubes of wisdom.

Perhaps we are all being trolled on a massive level. Maybe it's less sinister and it's just a spambot gone wrong. Perhaps @horse_ebooks is being autobiographically correct that "The Rich Jerk Has Made a Fortune Using This Exact Method." I'll keep watching to find out, though.

2 comments:

  1. you know I've been baffled by horse_ebooks like it was some great injoke. I was reading on huffingtonpost the other day it was just some twitterbot that spams out random sentences from the books to humanise the twitter feed and to entice people to visit the website.

    Anyway there's a great tumblr that has comics drawn of some of the best horse_ebook tweets that's worth checking out http://horseecomics.tumblr.com/

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  2. Goddammit, Jeff, I was thinking just last night about how I should do a Horse e_books post!

    Basically it's a Russian eBooks retailer who to avoid spam detection on twitter uses a bot that chooses random chunks of the books he sells and tweets them. It's a bot, but an amusingly flawed and wonderful one.

    More info here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/twitter-horse-ebooks.php

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