Biz Stone from Twitter discusses bots / spammers with ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio.
Q. (ZDNet) I’ve seen some concerns pop up lately about the combination of Twitter bots / spammers and URL redirection sites (a la TinyURL). Are you concerned about an infiltration of malicious links into the Twitter feed? Have you considered creating a way to post smaller links that allows users to preview the originating URL?
A. (Biz Stone) User security is absolutely a concern and we’re working to make the interface safer in that regard. We are looking into other ways to display shared links, for example noting whether a link goes to a picture or a video or some other media element. While more a feature, this could help in addressing some of the risk with the URL redirection.
Q. (ZDNet) What about the bots? Wouldn’t eliminating some of these offenders help both improve the user experience and diminish some of the pings to the API?
A. (Biz Stone) Absolutely and we’re working on that now. We analyze friend/follower ratios and frequency of updates and this alerts us to whether or not something is spam. We’re very intolerant and have no problem deleting massive amounts of accounts doing anything of that nature. It ruins the tool and makes it inefficient.
Read the complete interview here.
