Stop Twitter Spam

There’s been an awful lot of discussion lately about the suggested users list that Twitter now presents to new users signing up for the service.

• LA Times Blog – Twitter’s suggested users get mammoth boost from new feature
• Scripting.com (Dave Winer) – Why it’s time to break out of Twitter
• TechCrunch: How Much Is A Suggested Slot On Twitter Worth?  Jason Calacanis Offers $250K.
• FriendFeed discussion: this bullshit about buying a place in Twitter Suggested Followers is really pissing me off

From the TechCrunch piece:

It is not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers every day

10,000 new followers per day sounds like an astounding number but are all of these followers legitimate?  Earlier tonight on FriendFeed, Robert Scoble made this comment about TechCrunch’s (one of the suggested accounts on Twitter’s suggested users list) list of followers…

… Visit the follower list of anyone on this list. Here’s TechCrunch’s follower list: http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/… Now click on 100 followers. Do you notice anything weird? I sure do. These are NOT real people!

Sure enough, quite a few of the new followers look like this:

And here’s another one…

And there are a lot of other accounts that look like that.  No profile photo.  No tweets.  Following 20 people but 0 followers.  Most likely a bot.

I generally understand why Twitter has introduced the suggested users list.  Ev and Biz have talked openly about how the new user experience on Twitter is not very good and this was an attempt to provide some initial content to new users.  I don’t think they ever expected these suggested users to attract 10K new followers a day and quickly get to 200K-300K followers in just a few weeks.  This whole thing seems very blown out of proportion because there’s a very good chance that these numbers are meaningless.

Twitter has been doing a relatively good job of getting rid of spam accounts once they’ve been reported.  But they need to get more sophisticated and figure out ways to prevent spam accounts from getting created in the first place.  This means creating more sophisticated linits on the API’s and an Akismet-style technique for sending suspicous looking accounts to a suspected spam area *before* they become legitimate accounts.  And the current hand-picked list of suggested users should be replaced with a recommendation engine that looks more like Mr. Tweet.  Twitter is at a critical juncture – breaking out with the mainstream but, at the same time, alienating some of the early adopters who helped to build the business in the first couple of years.  I hope they’re listening.