Stop Twitter Spam

Mashable recently took a look at the RU4Real experiment. This is a fake Twitter account built for the sole purpose of finding out how many people would follow it back, even though the profile included specific instructions to not follow back. Turns out that quite a few people still followed the account, either due to running an auto-follow script or following the account without bothering to look at the profile.

This makes me think of a discussion earlier today on Twitter about whether or not you should care about who is following you. Robert Scoble took the position that it doesn’t matter at all and you should only care about who YOU are following.

Scobleizer:
noise is good. If you don’t want noise, just use TweetScan to search. Followers don’t matter. It’s who YOU follow that matters.

Scoble would not take no for an answer on this point. There are many other people on Twitter, myself included, who want more control over who is following them. If we see that an obvious spammer has started following, we will block them. If the new follower seems interesting, we’ll follow back. If the person doesn’t seem interesting we won’t follow back but we won’t block.

So why is there so much difference of opinion on this topic of Twitter Followers? Are followers just an anonymous audience (like people who subscribe to an RSS feed), or should we be spending a half-minute on each new Follower clicking through to their profile to make a decision on whether or not we should follow back?

I came up with an analogy that isn’t perfect but it helps me to put this into context. This is from a comment that I made earlier on this blog so apologies to the handful of people who already saw this.

The main question that you have to ask yourself is:

Do you treat Twitter like your house or like a stadium?

If you treat Twitter like a house, you’ll want to know who someone is before you let them in the front door. If a stranger knocks at the front door, you’re going to ask them a lot of questions before you would even consider letting them in. If it’s someone going door to door and asking you to sign a petition, trying to sell you something, etc. you might not even answer the door. This screening process is like the New Follower notification + profile check that many people do with every new follower.

On the other hand, if you have a very large audience like Scoble, Calacanis, or Leo Laporte, you’re going to treat Twitter like a stadium. The more the merrier and everyone is welcome. In this case, Scoble, or Jason, or Leo is the guy on stage and the followers are in the seats. Every now and then they’ll do a Q&A with the audience. If a heckler in row 15 gets too annoying they might kick them out of the stadium (block them on Twitter).

I think both models are acceptable. Like many people have said, no two people have the same experience on Twitter. The problem is, we don’t have the right controls in place to screen new followers in an efficient way. We need a Twitter version of a ‘Don’t Call List’ or, going back to the house analogy, a ‘No Solicitors’ sign that you can hang on your Twitter front door.