There was an interesting comment on a recent blog post by Read/Write Web called Social Networks and Spam. Twitturls.com aggregates popular URL’s that have been posted on Twitter.
At twitturls.com, a full 20% of the links we crawl from the public timeline are spam. This has been trending significantly up. Most of the code for the site is written to detect and delete spam before it reaches the homepage.
- Justin (Twitturls.com)
If you saw an arsonist lighting a fire would you try and stop them and/or put out the fire? Or would you just say that this is the fire department’s problem and ignore it? Would you at least report the fire? Would it make a difference if the fire was near your house or favorite winery?
If Twitter matters to you — has value to you — then you should care that your service could go away if Twitter can’t fix the problems. Are you just willing to jump to the next service, like plurk, FriendFeed or identi.ca? If you are then you are forgetting that the value of Twitter is not the technology, but the social network itself that you’ve created.
