Stop Twitter Spam

Wow. The developer of Twerp Scan (@Carlo) is on a roll. He has been rolling out a steady stream of feature, performance, and usability updates since he rolled out Twerp Scan over a week ago. Today he added a new feature that allows you to rate your contacts with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Not only that, these ratings are shared with other people who are using twerp Scan. So when you run Twerp Scan you might see a new Follower with 99 thumbs-up’s and 2 thumnbs-down’s. Probably someone worth following. Finally, Twitter has the beginnings of a reputation system. Below is a screen-shot showing the new Reputation column. Once again - great job Carlo!

Click on the screen-shot for the full-sized image.

A couple of weeks ago we posted about Track Spam. In that scenario (the @mytweets spammer), the victims of the spam were anyone who was tracking the hashtags that the spammer injected into their tweets. Yesterday Steve Gillmor (Gillmor Gang) was victimized by a more targeted version of Track Spam. Steve uses the GTalk client to read his Twitter stream and he makes extensive use of the track command to see tweets that are addressed to him and any tweets that mention him by name. So what’s the problem? In the past couple of days, someone on Twitter has sent a flurry of annoying tweets to Steve. Because she is using his name (@stevegillmor) in the tweets, these tweets are showing up in Steve’s Twitter stream, even though Steve isn’t following this person. Right now, there is nothing he can do to put a stop to this short of untracking his name, which would make Twitter almost useless to him. Even blocking this person won’t stop those tweets from polluting his Twitter stream.

This whole controversy was captured on yesterday’s NewsGang Live. It starts a few minutes in and goes on for more than an hour. Warning - it is VERY painful to listen to. The person who has been targeting Steve is on the call and she constantly cuts off anyone who tries to engage in the discussion with her.

There is a discussion thread on Get Satisfaction about this “hole” in the Track feature. If you have an opinion about this, please go to that thread and follow it.

Update:
This thread on Get Satisfaction is more active.

The Twitter Blacklist might not be perfect, but it is getting a lot of attention and sending a loud and clear message about the growing Twitter Spam issue.  It even has the attention of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.

DVDxR/BLOG raises some very valid points about the recently launched Twitter Blacklist. The main complaint is that the use of the Following:Followers ratio is not enough and, as a result, non-spammers are getting caught in the list. So what needs to be added to the formula? From the DVDxR BLOG post:

While I agree that a blacklist of twitter-spammers is a good thing, probably approaching necessary, some logic other than just an arbitrary ratio of followers needs to be used to determine who is a spammer and who is just trying to get the most out of twitter. A more indepth analysis of tweets is needed, and without some other info (such as Blocked stats for users) it probably can’t be automated. The only tell-tale way to tag a spammer would be to look at links in tweets, but how to do you sort out the spammers from the Scobleizers or mashables?

I still think the best set of criteria for what defines someone worth following on Twitter comes from none other than Merlin Mann. These suggestions were actually suggestions for additions to the Profile page but maybe they could be reworked for a spammer detection algorithm.

Twitter Spam is a hot topic on Twitt(url)y (a Techmeme for Twitter). Two recently launched tools for fighting Twitter Spam - Twerp Scan and Twitter Blacklist - are at the top of the list. Just further proof that this is an issue that needs attention NOW.

Click here for the full-sized screen-shot.