Stop Twitter Spam

Last week, Twitter board member Fred Wilson (A VC) wrote an interesting blog post about how Twitter was struggling with a large percentage of email notifications going to the Bulk Mail / Junk Folder. They’ve made some dramatic improvements using a service called Return Path (see this PDF for details). According to the PDF, Twitter has now achieved 100% deliverability at Windows Live Hotmail, increased their deliverability to Yahoo! email by 124%, and their overall deliverability to all domains to 90% on average.

First of all, this might explain why some people inexplicably claimed to have never seen spam on Twitter while many other people (myself included) have been complaining about the rising levels of spam on Twitter for months. If all of your New Follower emails are going straight to your Junk Mail folder then you will have a false perception that there are no spam problems on Twitter. Now that the New Follower emails are going through to more people, those people are finally experiencing the hell that is a New Follower email from an obvious spammer. Before I saw this white paper, I was surprised when I saw someone announce that they have received their first Twitter spam. This Return Path white paper provides a possible explanation for this.

Second, this is good news for spammers who, until recently, were not reaching the inboxes of many Yahoo and Hotmail email users. Now that more of the New Follower emails are going through, the spammers have an expanded audience. All the more reason for Twitter to improve their New Follower email notification and continue their purging of spam accounts.

By the way, whatever happened to Twitter suppressing New Follower emails from obvious spammers? In Late May, Twitter co-founder Eve Williams quietly acknowledged that they were not sending out the New Follower email if the new follower’s profile was a suspected spammer based on some secret formula. For a while I was seeing almost no spammy New Follower emails but a few weeks ago I started seeing these coming through again. It wouldn’t surprise me if they moved away from that policy because many people complained that this was a half-baked solution. The lack of a New Follower email didn’t stop the spammer from following you, so people had to resort to tools like Twerp Scan or My Tweeple to get rid of the followers that were silently following them.

The founder of Twitter Blacklist has closed down the Twitter Blacklist site. In fact, he has completely given up on Twitter and has accepted a job working on Laconica, which is the open source software that powers Twitter-clone Identi.ca. Here is the full text of his goodbye message:

As of July 12th 2008, this service will no longer be available.

Dear friends, fans, and foes,

Of late I’ve lost confidence in Twitter as a platform. Their uptime is risible; their community interaction questionable. (Think failure to enforce their own TOS - “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users”? Forget it.) I don’t think Twitter’s going to get any better; in fact, I think it’s all downhill from here on out.

Luckily there’s now an alternative. Check out Identi.ca. It’s open source and open data. If spam becomes an issue - and let’s face it, it will - the community will be the ones who work out how to deal with it, and it’ll happen - fast. That’s a guarantee we don’t have with Twitter.

I’m confident that Identi.ca, and Laconica, the software that powers it, are the right route to take into the future. (Full disclosure: confident enough, in fact, to have accepted a job working on the project.) For that reason, I won’t be running the Twitter Blacklist any more, and will be shutting down the API.

Thanks very much for all the support and interest you’ve shown for the duration of this experiment, and I hope that you’ll consider moving on from Twitter to a sustainable alternative.

— Earle

In case anyone is wondering, I am sticking with Twitter and still think there is a bright future for them. I welcome new services like Identi.ca because I think they will push Twitter to make their service better. But my community is still on Twitter and I believe in the team that Twitter has assembled.

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)