Stop Twitter Spam

SquareSpace did it last month and Moonfruit is doing it this month. These companies are both using Twitter to market their product by having people tweet something with their company name in the hashtag (#squarespace, #moonunit). The incentive? For SquareSpace it was the chance to win a free iPhone (sort of) over a thirty day period and for Moonfruit it’s the chance to win a MacBook Pro over the next ten days. Whatever you think of this marketing approach, you can’t argue with the result. #moonfruit is one of the top trending topics today.

@TEDChris has a great post today analyzing this marketing tactic and questioning if it’s really worth polluting your Twitter stream when the chances of winning are so small.

- Would you post an ad for a random company through your friends’ doors in return for for a 1 in 200,000 chance of winning a computer? (If you did that every single day your whole life, chances are still overwhelming that you’d never win… …and even more overwhelming that you’d end up with no friends .)

- Assuming each tweet gets seen on average by 20 people, Moonfruit are buying media “impressions” here at a CPM rate of less than 50 cents… equivalent to ‘junk’ space online, and easily low enough to tempt in a lot of other companies.

- Bottom line… our words and connections are being bought on the cheap! And unless the Twitterverse wises up, we’ll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam.

One Fine Jay compares these types of contests to beautiful highways getting ruined by too many billboards.

Just as the plethora of billboards ruined the skylines of Route 66 and other great highways of the past, advertising today in its most blatant forms has invaded any mental domain imaginable. Nowhere is safe, definitely not Twitter. It’s no surprise that online marketing and advertising would pounce on a free medium to promote their wares.

He goes on to describe how these types of contests put us in the difficult position of deciding whether or not to unfollow people who clutter their twitter-stream with these meaningless hashtags.

… Hashtag contests are turning the people I following into spammers.

This, too, is different from a lottery. Games of chance where participants pay to play are usually regulated. Free raffles are usually not. Take note that I am not yet ready to call shenanigans on this, but instead of paid participation, people offer up their time. In a world of free content all vying for our attention, our time remains the most valuable asset we are all too willing to give up.

Moonfruit’s campaign and the clones it will spawn will lead to a general degradation in the aesthetic of the Twitter stream. To a user, we have but two choices: bear through it, or unfollow someone. Getting spammed three messages at a time by half of my users is a painful thing to sit through, because I’d rather not block or unfollow these people. They are still worth following, and it is this good will that I and others extend to the people we follow that companies capitalize on whenever they do these awful contests.

Kev from Outside Lines says:

Here’s an idea for “Twitter promotion done right” - make a great product, and release it with a clever launch. If it’s smart, everyone talk about it. Get to the top of the trending topics legitimately, not by dangling carrots in front of keyboard-equiped imbeciles who don’t know better.

Coverage elsewhere:

• ReadWriteWeb: Twitter Needs a Spam Filter? No, We Need a Marketer Filter
• Jermemiah Owyang: Breakdown: 3 Ways Brands Are Earning –and Buying– Followers on Twitter
• Econsultancy: Moonfruit: Paying for social media prowess
• Mashable: Twitter Promotion Done Right: #moonfruit
• Shooting at Bubbles: Marketers count on gullibility so you will spam for them

Yesterday I started to use Trendrr to track mentions of “twitter spam” and @spam on Twitter.  Here are two real-time charts showing the number of mentions per hour.  As of the writing of this blog post, @spam is mentioned between 10 and 50 times per hour.  “twitter spam” is mentioned up to 120 times per hour.

I first heard about Trendrr on Fred Wilson’s excellent A VC blog. You can track up to ten phrases for free. Pro accounts range from $49 / month (30 phrases) to $999 / month (unlimited phrases and full reporting). You can follow Trendrr on Twitter here: @Trendrr.

Last month, Aviv Raff (@avivra ) announced that July 2009 would be the Month of Twitter Bugs. From his June 15th blog post:

I’ve decided to declare July 2009 as “Month of Twitter Bugs” (MoTB). I’m doing so in order to raise the awareness of the Twitter API issue I recently blogged about. MoTB could have been easily converted to any other “Month of Web2.0 service bugs”, and I hope that Twitter and other Web2.0 API providers will work closely with their API consumers to develop more secure products.
Each day I will publish a new vulnerability in a 3rd party Twitter service on the twitpwn.com web site. As those vulnerabilities can be exploited to create a Twitter worm, I’m going to give the 3rd party service provider and Twitter at-least 24 hours heads-up before I publish the vulnerability.

Today (July 1st), Aviv published the first vulnerability: MoTB #01: Multiple vulnerabilities in bit.ly service.  The good news?  The vulnerabilities were fixed in just three hours.  It’ll be interesting to see what Aviv comes up with over the next 30 days.  You can follow the progress on the TwitPwn blog or follow Aviv’s #MoTB tweets.

It was just a matter of time before spammers capitalize on the sad death of Michael Jackson.  Twitspam.org is tracking down accounts that are trying to profit from the death of a pop icon.

This guy is sending out misleading tweets that lead to a Zazzle site that peddles awful MJ RIP products.

Twitter has figured out a way to get rid of Trending Topics spam.  Remove it completely from the sidebar. The Search box and saved searches were removed as well.  According to the Twitter Status blog, this is a temporary thing.  Twitter has a history of pulling features and not bringing them back (remember Track?). Hopefully that won’t be the case with this. Of course, you can still see the Trending Topics on the Twitter Search page.

The topics that are trending right now are a reflection of how people are feeling on this very, very sad day.

Updates:

• Trending Topics is back as of about 10:30 pm PST.
• Looks like there are some people out there who want a user preference to remove Trending Topics from the Twitter Home page.

SophosLabs produced this video describing how Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter account led many of his followers to a malware site. (via WSJ Bits)

At the end of the interview, Jackson speculates that Twitter has already started to rank search results for Profile searches.

(via Search Engine Watch)

In the past day or so, I’ve noticed that several accounts that I’ve been following have been hijacked by porn accounts.  PC World reports that Guy Kawasaki was a victim of this latest attack.  From the PC World post:

Recently scammers have become more aggressive on the site. They will set up new accounts and post spam messages on hot topics in hopes of gaining clicks when people search through Twitter.

And while hacked Twitter accounts are still rare, they’re a much more effective way to reach victims, according to Rik Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro. “If you can take over an account that has a couple of thousand follower then you can get a much better return on your investment”

The Trojan link posted by Guy Kawasaki has been followed by more than 1,600 people, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

More coverage on TechMeme.

This is from a rant about people who game Twitter by using software to artificially inflate their Follower counts, a practice that Twitter is cracking down on now according to Jesse Stay.

Twitter is inherently based on a follower count. You follow people, people follow you. A decent number of followers is about 50-100. Yet some people on Twitter have 60-90 thousand.

Thousand!

Are these individuals celebrities? Have they made such monumental marks on society that thousands of people want access to their mind?

No. Most are Realtors from Florida. Self-proclaimed experts in social media, SEO, marketing.

- tremendous news! : Dear People Who Game Twitter For Followers: It’s Over

A web site (I’m not going to mention the name) is selling services for boosting follower counts on Twitter.  They have multiple packages available promising to increase follower counts to 1,000 in 7 days ($87), 2,500 in 14 days ($147), 5,000 in 21 days ($212.25), 10,000 in 45 days ($372.75), and 100,000 in - wait for it - 365 days ($3,479)!  I’m not surprised that these types of services exist.  But I am surprised that they’re bold enough to advertise this type of service in such plain view.  This company is already infamous for selling similar services for gaining popularity on Digg (promising to get stories on to the front page of Twitter).