It seems I may be a bit late to recognise the real threat to Twitter that spam is going to present. I have had spammy followers so far but only today did I come across the first really obstructive tweet. Alone it was not all that bad but if we get the hundreds of them like you do in other arenas, blog comments, chat rooms, email spam it could stop some of the more useful features of twitter.
The tweet I saw was following a search on #burnham-on-crouch where I am from. I was trying to see if there was any talk of cricket nets, a long shot that failed. However I saw a tweet about 360 degree feedback, a field I used to develop software in. Naturally I thought I should investigate further. However the user had posted tweets similarly for hundreds of towns. The offending buggers were: 360degree-feedback dot com (don’t want to give them the pleasure of a natural link).
This dishonesty has real implications. It could mean that a lot of useful searches on twitter will just return rows and rows of spam. It could also mean that ridiculous amounts of tweets flood on to the system, will the architecture cope? It already wobbles every so often.
This post offers some of the solutions presented in April 2009 : http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/26/here-comes-twitter-spam-and-how-to-fight-it/
Hopefully people are ahead of me on this issue and can see ways to prevent it. For the first time the unstoppable machine that was the Twitter of my eyes is now more in danger.
EDIT: Seems there is a whole site for this: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/proposed-solutions/
