Stop Twitter Spam

Yesterday on Twitter I saw this tweet from @Carlo…

A couple of hours later he had the first version of the tool working. The tool is called Twitter Twerp Scanner and you can try it out here. Below is a screen-shot showing some of the output from the tool. It evaluates how many people your followers are following and their Followers:Following ratio to make a determination on whether or not you might want to block them. Right now the threshold for flagging someone is a little too “trigger happy” for my tastes (it flags someone if they’re following more than 1,000 and their F:F ratio is > 1) but Carlo has mentioned that he will soon be rolling out user defined thresholds. Also, there is currently a limitation on the number of followers that it will scan (100) but he is working on expanding that. All in all I think it’s a great tool and I’m looking forward to the enhancements.

Updates:
1) Carlo has mentioned that this is still a work in progress and the results might not be 100% correct. Still, I am impressed by what he has put together in such a short amount of time. (4/23/08)

2) The parameters (Following number and Following:Follower ratio) are now user defined and the tool will now scan all of your followers.  Also, the URL has changed to http://www.twerpscan.com (4/24/08)