So I think most geeks or curious people in general have checked out @Microsoft‘s long-unused Twitter account, only to find a skimpy amount of followers and no tweets to speak of.

Today, that changed in what is apparently Microsoft’s effort to get in on the Twitter marketing business (as 1 out of every 2 Twitter spammers love to tell you about).

Microsoft on Twitter

Microsoft vs. Linux on the Twitter front

Where to begin – how about the lovely fact that Linux has more Twitter followers than Microsoft! 10,000 vs 2,000 – clearly a win for Linux marketing over MS, as highlighted in the above image. While they still have a ways to go before topping the corporation in desktop market share, they clearly are better off in viral marketing.

Cotags FAIL

The second thing I highlighted in the above screenshot was their usage of @cotags using the web as the client instead of CoTweet. Most have no idea what I’m talking about, so here it is: most shared Twitter accounts use cotags to “sign” tweets using the authors initials, and the CoTweet client is built just for this.

The web client isn’t, so they are typing that in every time they post. We’re guilty of the same thing, although we use cotags moreso to tell whom the author of an article is when posting links. Even worse, there is no cotags legend in their image, so you have to guess whom the author is or visit the image every time to reference it.

Speaking of the image…

We have no room to talk, but the background image used by MS on their Twitter account shown in the above screenshot was taken by a very large (37″ LCD TV) screen, yet it looks like boiled crap.

You’d think the corporate giant would have more money to hire a decent photoshopper, or did they fire those in their layoffs, too?

Verified Account?

Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Microsoft’s own Major Nelson have the currently in-beta “Verified Account” button on their account pages, to show that the account is owned by them and not some random person claiming to be.

Microsoft not only lacks one, but for the longest time I thought the Twitter account named “Microsoft” was really a spammer or sockpuppeteer just trying to gain a few more followers. If it still is, they’ve just gotten more ballsier in their trademark infringement.

But there really is no way to tell until Microsoft gets the “Verified Account” button, and if they had any sense – they would.

Together with Bing

This isn’t the first official Microsoft Twitter account, but it is the first one since Bing started indexing Twitter results. The coincidence doesn’t surprise me at all, since if you’re going to have a Twitter marketing account, you might as well index it using your search engine as well.

For now, this looks like one front where Bing is actually ahead of Google: “Real-time” Twitter Indexing.

Overall Score: FAIL

Clearly, so far the Twitter move by Microsoft has been a huge flop so far. That said, just this post alone could bump up their follower number, but for now it is looking pretty pitiful.

And should they get more followers than Linux after I brag on the fact in this post, then I guess it wouldn’t be the first time MS arrives late to a game only to dominate it *cough* netbooks *cough*.

UPDATE: It seems Twitter also upped their API limit from 100 to 150 per hour, as clients like TweetDeck noticed.