I’m giving away a copy of my book, JBoss in Action, on twitter.com. To enter you have to follow me and then retweet a message that I have prepared (see below). I’m sure people have done this sort of thing before on Twitter, but due to my naivety, and my neologistic tendencies, I’ll just call this a “Follow-Retweet-Contest” or FoRC since that lends itself to the idea that you are “forking” your message when others retweet it.

I’m doing this in part because I want to promote my book and make more people in the JBoss community aware of its existence. But I’m also doing this as a social experiment. I want to see how virulent a $50 USD item giveaway can be for a product that has limited interest (not everybody codes in Java and uses JBoss AS). My hypothesis is that if I were to FoRC somwhere on the order of $1,000,000 USD cash that I would get significant media coverage, tens of thousands of followers (fast), and so much retweeting that practically every user of Twitter would have the promotion in their update list. If I were to do the same promotion for $50 USD cash, I wouldn’t get the media coverage or the the broad/pervasive exposure in Twitter, but I’d still get a few followers (perhaps into the hundreds).

Anyways, I don’t have a million dollars, and I’m not looking to throw out money just to gain followers, but I do I have a few copies of my book laying around, so I thought I’d try it out and see what happens. Here are the rules:

1. Follow me on Twitter: @javidjamae (yes you’ll need an account if you don’t already have one)
2. Retweet the following:
   

   RT @javidjamae Win a copy of my book JBoss in Action. Follow me and retweet this to enter. I’ll pay shipping up to $20 USD. #java #jboss

I will pick a random participant from the users who have entered and will pay up to $20 USD to ship the book anywhere internationally. I’ll wait until I have about 20 or so new followers from the promotion before I declare a winner.

Let’s see what happens.

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