Stop Twitter Spam

…what I find particularly interesting is that the company promises it will be watching for malicious Twitter profiles looking to infect your computer. It looks to me that we will soon be offered new anti-virus software releases that protect not only our emails and web surfing but Twitter desktop clients as well. It will be interesting to watch another industry profiting off Twitter while it still seems to have no idea how to monetize their own service.

- Profy.com, Twitter Gets More Malicious Ways to Hurt You – Watch Out for Rabbits

I never check the new follower notification e-mails with any urgency now as I know it’s just a spambot. Very boring.

- @purplelime

Twitter has enough problems — like what’s the revenue model? the periodic service disruptions suggest they’re having scaling issues, some of which could be cash-related — without the Invasion of the Spammers, but it was an inevitable deveopment for a social appliance that may turn out to be a victim of its own success.

But I think the first comment on this entry in Twitter’s in-house blog is indicative of their best asset:

I offer my help. Seriously.

You can’t buy the goodwill earned by creating something people love. I don’t know what the answer is, but part of it will certainly be Twitter fans hanging in there.

- Richard Delevan: Twitter Fighting Spam

Don’t be the guy that jumps on Twitter, “follows” 10,000 people, then tweets “@” them every two minutes. That’s not the type of reputation you want to build for yourself.

- Mashable: 5 Twitter Tactics for Building a Stellar Brand

As those of us who love Twitter have found out so painfully over the past months, [Twitter's] resources are not INFINITE. No, in fact, they are quite finite.

So, it is with these realizations that I have decided that I must actively block Twitter accounts which are abusing resources. This does my part in “cleaning up the system” and it also serves as a community marker (a la Craigslist) that denotes to Twitter that the account in question is one that should be watched more closely as a potential abuser. It also may give them a clue as to patterns, account names, URLs that are posted, IP addresses, etc., to help thwart abusers of Twitter’s resources (which in the end, affects all of us).

- Damon Clinkscales – FemmeBots and Other Twitter Spammers Must Die

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.

- /dev/null/kevin: Why You Should Care About Twitter Spam

A scan of the excellent Twitter search site Summize shows a large amount of people tweeting about lost followers over the past few days. No one knows for sure what is going on but a few have keyed in on the idea that Twitter may simply be deleting the accounts of users it marked as spammers.

- Venture Beat > Losing Twitter Followers?  It’s not you, It’s Twitter

66 percent of the 972 social networking users polled indicated that they would be at least “somewhat likely” to switch to another social network if they “received a significant number unwanted, or spam, friend invitations, messages, or postings.”

- Mashable: Why Social Network Spam Matters

Twitter’s scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower.  The more followers people have, the slower twitter is.  The follow-spammers just increase that load.  Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people.  That’s 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet.  There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that’s hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.

- /dev/null/kevin: Twitter Needs to Delete the Spammers

Following a lot of people does help you get more involved with Twitter. That’s the point of Twitter. However, don’t do it all at one time. This is the worst advice to give a new Twitter user without any type of clarification on how to do it.

- SheGeeks: Twitter 101 (05/04/08)