It was just a matter of time before spammers capitalize on the sad death of Michael Jackson. Twitspam.org is tracking down accounts that are trying to profit from the death of a pop icon.
This guy is sending out misleading tweets that lead to a Zazzle site that peddles awful MJ RIP products.
Twitter has figured out a way to get rid of Trending Topics spam. Remove it completely from the sidebar. The Search box and saved searches were removed as well. According to the Twitter Status blog, this is a temporary thing. Twitter has a history of pulling features and not bringing them back (remember Track?). Hopefully that won’t be the case with this. Of course, you can still see the Trending Topics on the Twitter Search page.
The topics that are trending right now are a reflection of how people are feeling on this very, very sad day.
Updates:
SophosLabs produced this video describing how Guy Kawasaki’s Twitter account led many of his followers to a malware site. (via WSJ Bits)
At the end of the interview, Jackson speculates that Twitter has already started to rank search results for Profile searches.
(via Search Engine Watch)
In the past day or so, I’ve noticed that several accounts that I’ve been following have been hijacked by porn accounts. PC World reports that Guy Kawasaki was a victim of this latest attack. From the PC World post:
Recently scammers have become more aggressive on the site. They will set up new accounts and post spam messages on hot topics in hopes of gaining clicks when people search through Twitter.
And while hacked Twitter accounts are still rare, they’re a much more effective way to reach victims, according to Rik Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro. “If you can take over an account that has a couple of thousand follower then you can get a much better return on your investment”
The Trojan link posted by Guy Kawasaki has been followed by more than 1,600 people, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
More coverage on TechMeme.
This is from a rant about people who game Twitter by using software to artificially inflate their Follower counts, a practice that Twitter is cracking down on now according to Jesse Stay.
Twitter is inherently based on a follower count. You follow people, people follow you. A decent number of followers is about 50-100. Yet some people on Twitter have 60-90 thousand.
Thousand!
Are these individuals celebrities? Have they made such monumental marks on society that thousands of people want access to their mind?
No. Most are Realtors from Florida. Self-proclaimed experts in social media, SEO, marketing.
- tremendous news! : Dear People Who Game Twitter For Followers: It’s Over
A web site (I’m not going to mention the name) is selling services for boosting follower counts on Twitter. They have multiple packages available promising to increase follower counts to 1,000 in 7 days ($87), 2,500 in 14 days ($147), 5,000 in 21 days ($212.25), 10,000 in 45 days ($372.75), and 100,000 in – wait for it – 365 days ($3,479)! I’m not surprised that these types of services exist. But I am surprised that they’re bold enough to advertise this type of service in such plain view. This company is already infamous for selling similar services for gaining popularity on Digg (promising to get stories on to the front page of Twitter).
Trending Topics spam on Twitter has been a hot topic lately. Spammers are loading their tweets up with trending topics, resulting in a polluted stream of tweets and the risk of clicking on a link that infects your computer with malware. And recently, pranksters have been trying to game Trending Topics by repeatedly tweeting inappropriate terms. Twitter responded to this by removing the offensive terms from the Trending Topics leaderboard.
Here are a couple of ways to work around this problem using third-party solutions.
1) Clean Tweets
Clean Tweets is a clever Firefox toolbar add-on that filters out Twitter Spam from Twitter search results. Here’s an explanation of how it works from the Clean Tweets web site:
Clean Tweets does various actions when you use Twitter Search at either Search.twitter.com or when you access search from within your web based profile.
It automatically deletes any tweets from accounts that are less than 24hrs old (or how long you specify). A lot of search spam comes from churn and burn accounts that spam until they get flagged so doing this cuts down on a lot of spam. (don’t worry legit newcomers you can show up tomorrow).
Anyone tweet that mentions 3 or more (or what you decide) trending topics in it will not show up. Most spammers also list every trending topic they can find after their little spammy speal so this is a good way to cut down automatically as well.
Manual Delete Option. For the spammers that sqeak by or just list one trend at a time you can click an X by their avatar and it will delete their tweet and remove them from ever showing up again. (don’t worry if you accidently delete your friend you can get them back in your settings)
It is pretty simple but in the days we have been testing it, it is very effective and cuts down on a lot of spam. The best part is it doesn’t slow search, or change anything, it is like the spam was never there.
It provides a safer, more enjoyable Twitter Search experience.
If you click on the Clean Tweets toolbar, you can change the filtering parameters.
For more coverage on Clean Tweets, check out this post on Mashable.
2) almost.at
almost.at is a good option if you’re trying to follow conversations on Twitter about an important or popular event, for example: the Protests in Iran, a tech conference that is generating a lot of buzz, etc. almost.at filters out spam by only including tweets from people who are at the actual event. This almost guarantees that you won’t see any obvious Twitter Spam on the almost.at site. And there’s an added benefit of not seeing dozens of re-tweets from people who aren’t at the event. Of course, this means that you’ll be missing out on potentially insightful commentary from people who are tracking the event closely but not physically there. And the content on almost.at is limited to a handful of events each day, so this isn’t a general solution for all trending topics. I really think that people will turn to these types of curated services more and more if Twitter doesn’t come up with a better way to filter out the spam and noise resulting from excessive re-tweets.
For more details about almost.at, listen to this recent episode of the Net at Night podcast, which includes an interview with David Cann, the guy behind almost.at.
Are there other tools that you’re using to filter out Trending Topics spam? Share your solutions in the comments.
Updates:
As if spam on Twitter isn’t enough, now we have Twitter get-rich-quick schemes invading your email inbox.
(via deleteyourself)
Graham Cluley (@gcluley) warns about giving your user name and password to Twitter services that promise hundreds of new followers.
Off the rails: Twitter, passwords and Twittertrain from Sophos Labs on Vimeo.
