Facebook can find you a couple hundred friends you never knew you had. LinkedIn might snag you a couple of career connections here and there. But on Twitter, you can achieve the instant status of claiming tens of thousands, even a million, followers without the pesky task of starting your own religion.

Even before actor Ashton Kutcher earned the bragging rights of beating CNN in the race to reach 1 million Twitter followers, the frenzy to gain more followers on the microblogging site inspired a cadre of Internet marketers and Web developers to sell their methods of exponentially increasing a person’s Twitter following. Part of the craze is about social status, part of it is about business promotion and, according to some Twitter users, much of it is suspect.

For the uninitiated, the term "brute force" might sound incompatible with a communication platform whose mascot is a diminutive sparrow. "In the online sense, it means to force an issue—rapidly firing a method either on a server or a service in an inauthentic way to get a lot out of a service in a short space of time," says Phil Campbell, a 36-year-old freelance Web developer and consultant based in Derbyshire, England.

The term goes back to the days of the first modern software companies, when hackers tried to discover a software product’s protective serial code by building a program called a key generator, which entered possible combinations at a breakneck pace until it broke though a program’s protective barrier.

"Brute force is the best way to describe my software," says Peter Drew, CEO of XRT Services, which recently unveiled a product he calls Brute Force Twitter, the same name as Bryda’s product.

Drew sells a line of software products under the Brute Force brand and has used the brand for several years, long before, he says, Bryda began to sell his Brute Force Twitter. "I’m the Brute Force guy and everyone knows it," Drew says.

"Basically, the idea is about forcing your way to the top," says Dana Willhoit, 45, CEO of ThePressReleaseSite.com and a social-media consultant who partnered with Drew to create his Brute Force Twitter product.

Unlike Bryda’s product, which relies on manually employing different tactics, Drew’s Brute Force Twitter is a piece of software that automatically identifies and follows Twitter users who have tweeted specific keywords. Drew’s product is connected to a database of Twitter users, ensuring that users do not follow the same person twice and mitigating the risk of being reported to Twitter as a nuisance.

However, not all Twitter users feel that the software is any better or more organic than other techniques available. "It’s like walking into a pub and joining in a conversation about something when you do not know the background of the people or have respect for the flow of the conversation," Campbell says.

Twitter itself acknowledges the variety of ways its users view its service. "Many are experimenting with how to be more successful with Twitter and even what that means for them," says Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder and creative director. Nevertheless, Stone draws a line, albeit a hazy one, when it comes to using Twitter for spam purposes. "We look very seriously at those on a case-by-case basis. Accounts that violate our terms of service in this regard are suspended," Stone says.

Some believe that how you use brute-force methods matters more than the methods themselves. It’s up to users if they want to use Twitter for spam purposes, says Nathan Gilder, a 28-year-old Internet-marketing consultant who uses Drew’s Brute Force Twitter. "And the nice thing about Twitter is that if you don’t want to listen to someone, you can just unfollow them."