Here’s a screen-shot of a pitch for a “Micro Blogging Automation” Tool. That’s a fancy name for Twitter spambot. For about $200 up-front and about $50 per month, you can run your own Twitter spambot operation. Contact me if you want details on where I found this. I’m not going to link to it.
Take note of this feature:
we even invite friends / followers FOR YOU
Twitter spam is real. In the form of mass-following, hoping 4 kind (but sloppy) followback. i always ck no. of recent @s and follow ratio.
- Twitter user John Czwartacki (04/04/08)
Twitter Spam was recently a discussion topic on Steve Gillmor’s NewsGang Live podcast. This is from the 12:41 mark on the 03/31/08 edition (mp3):
[ NewsGang Live Guest ] (I’m not sure who said this)
Is there some kind of Twitter harvester that’s going on? I’m been getting followed by just tons of people that look like they’re following tons of people but don’t have any followers.[ Steve Gillmor ]
Well what does that mean - that they don’t have any followers? Is that a criteria for anything?[ NewsGang Live Guest ]
Well not necessarily. It just looks like they’re indiscriminately harvesting huge numbers of people from - say - Scoble, or…[ laughter ]
The discussion continues on with a mention of Twitter Karma. Karoli suspected that Twitter Karma might be the culprit for the spam but I really don’t think that is the case. Twitter Karma makes it easier to follow people who are already following you and it allows you to do that in a very convenient way. It is not a way to add random people. There are tools that do not but I will not give them them the benefit of a link.
Webomatica - Rooting Out Fake Spammy Twitterers
Webomatica has a great post today about how to root out Twitter Spammers. Everyone take 10 minutes today, go through your list of Followers, and root out the spam!
Seems like in the past month or so I’ve been getting a lot of follows for people who are following more than 1,000 people and only have about 100 followers.
Star’s world - The Twitter Spam Problem (04/04/08)
Several people today are getting hit multiple times by the same spammer (we’re looking at you cardiophile). It appears that this person is following a large number of people, then removing the follows, and following them again. As of right now he is only following 5 people, giving the appearance that he is not a spambot. Like we’ve said before, the best defense against this kind of activity is to block the user.
@cardiophile is getting annoying, he’s “now following” me three times today
Andrew Parsonsjust home from work, blocking repeat twitter spam adds
Dean Gray
Update:
More on this from blog, p.i.
