Stop Twitter Spam

When third parties start to clean up your spam/fraud problem you know you either have a nasty environment or a great ecosystem; in this case I think it just shows twitter has some killer developers following them.

- Angus Logan, Windows Live Platform, in reference to Twerp Scan (04/27/08)

I call out for a reasonable reputation system across our many services. Twitter is one such example, but there have been others in the past (yes, those other social networks) that have dealt with the same reputational issue, not to mention spam.

- Damon Cortesi: Twitter Reputation Statistics (04/27/08)

I will sometimes tweet something about my dog; if I know that in the next few days I’ll suddenly be followed by “people” who are actually companies selling dog products, I probably won’t do that; every time someone follows me it generates an email to notify me of that, and the number of spam follows is already getting annoying. (I just block those users.)

There’s really not much an individual who doesn’t want to be bothered by this can do about it. You can protect your tweets so that only your current followers can see them, but if people start doing that, Twitter becomes less useful for all. You can stop getting emails to tell you someone new is following you, but then you lose the opportunity to connect with interesting people you don’t know yet.

Thus far Twitter has been interesting (and compelling to users) because you can explore it, you can see what people are saying about all kinds of things, and discover new people who share your business or personal interests. Spam could kill that pretty quickly.

- The Opinionated Marketers: Will spam kill Twitter? (04/27/08)