You may have seen the latest Twitter trick for spreading your message. Those who use it might call it "viral marketing". I call it a Twhort (and that's not a good thing). Here's how it works.

A marketer offers a free download to anyone who "tweets" a particular message (ie. posts it on their Twitter account for their followers to read). The person wanting the download enters their Twitter username and password, which is used to post the tweet, and the person is sent to the download page.

I imagine in most cases, the marketer lives up to their pledge not to store the username and password for later use. We'll ignore that question for now.

Does that seem legit to you? Not to me.

Consider this: would you send an email blast that you couldn't edit, promoting something you hadn't yet gotten access to to your mailing list in order to get a free download? I'm sure some would. But I'm guessing most list owners would consider that spamming and refuse.

How is tweeting for downloads any different?

When I saw a tweet about this technique today, I though of two "twords" (Twitter words...or should that be twerms? ...or if they're bad, perhaps twurds? But I digress.)

Tweet + w***e = twhort.

Along the same lines, a person who induces others to twhort = a twimp.

Ask me to follow you to get the download if you want -- like opting into an email list. If I like what I see, THEN I'll tweet it.