Stop Twitter Spam

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about Twitter’s new following limits. The main issue has been that businesses and people who follow a lot of people can’t add new followers, even though they are not spamming people and their Following:Followers ratio is reasonable – e.g. 2:1, 1.5:1, etc.

I’ve been pretty vocal about this, pinging @ev and @biz about it (I didn’t get a response) and adding this comment on Get Satisfaction:

Twitter – you guys have said many times that you will be continually reviewing your approach to fighting spam and refining yout tactics over time. I’ve been tracking the new follower limits very closely and I can’t imagine that you guys were targeting @pandora_radio, @comcastcares, and dozens of other legitimate businesses and individuals with these limits. And telling them to just wait a few days to add new followers is asking for a tremendous amount of patience from some of your most loyal users. Please tell us that you guys are looking closely at whatever algorithm is behind the follower limits to insure that only the *real* bad guys (like the6figureteam.com spammers) are being flagged, not the good guys.

And I wasn’t the only one complaining about this. Brad Williams (@williamsba on Twitter) wrote a blog post called “Twitter Follow Limits are Jacked” and many others have been discussing it on Twitter and GetSatisfaction.

There is a new development today. Cathryn Hrudicka (a.k.a. @CreativeSage), who is one of the people who has been impacted by this, posted this comment on FriendFeed today:

So after my angst outburst last p.m., I got this cryptic email from Twitter today: “Thanks for requesting to be on Twitter’s API whitelist. We’ve approved your request! You should find any rate limits no longer apply to authenticated requests made by CreativeSage. This change should take effect within the next 24 hours. Thanks much, and good luck with your application!” So now we have to “apply” to NOT have quotas? I guess my repeated tweets & msgs. count as an “application.”

This is the first that I’ve heard about an API whitelist. I will update this post with further details as they become available. In the meantime, if you feel like you’ve been unfairly throttled by Twitter you should submit a support request to them pleading your case.

I still think that Twitter needs to fine tune their algorithm to eliminate the false positives but implementing a whitelist is a step in the right direction.

Update:

Based on this post on the Twitter Developer Group, API whitelisting has been around since at least May of this year. There is a special request form for it here. But this seems to be geared more towards applications that access the Twitter API and need to bypass the 100 requests/hour limit. For example, here is a tweet from the developer of Twitturly, which is a service that tracks the most popular links on Twitter. Maybe this same API whitelist controls the follower limits that are affecting people like @CreativeSage and @williamsba?

Update #2:

The first commenter on this blog post mentions this tweet from @williamsba:

“Your request for Twitter API whitelisting has been rejected, The whitelist is only for use by developers”…but….that’s what I am!

So based on this, there must have been some kind of mix-up with the email that was sent to @CreativeSage. The whitelist only applies to developers who are developing applications that access the Twitter API. If you’ve been hit with a follower limit – i.e. you are unable to follow people – it appears that you’re only recourse is removing followers. The people who are impacted by the continue to be upset and I don’t blame them – for example: this recent comment on Get Satisfaction.

Over the weekend, Biz Stone from Twitter said that he would explain the limits in more detail on the Twitter blog. As of today (July 31st) he hasn’t posted anything.

Update #3:

Progress. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams sent out this tweet earlier today (July 31), in response to @jesatieu:

Update #4 (8/7/08):

The saga continues. As far as I can tell, Twitter has not relaxed the rigid follow limits yet. Earlier today, Ev Williams posted on the Twitter blog about their anti-spam measures and left the door open for changes…

Recently, we’ve seen significant impact by introducing limits around how many accounts can be followed on Twitter under certain conditions. These limits are designed to not affect the vast majority of users. However, some people (who are not spammers) have (and will) run into them … let me note that these limits are still a work in progress. We’ve had some bugs in them that are still being worked out. And we need to tweak them to adapt to what we learn about our ever-changing system.

In the meantime, the people who have been impacted by these follow limits continue to be frustrated. Some are even giving up on Twitter and moving over to competing services such as Plurk.