I’d been offline all weekend, so this morning I decided to check my Twitter page. Twitter is a web site that lets users microblog with 140 character messages typed into the web site or mobile text messages.
I had a few new followers whom I did not know in real life, and each of them had weird names. A few reminded me of the passwords AOL used to stamp on its disks and CDs, while others were straight from a spammer’s imagination:
- agoraindex
- tarahbrown
- MyInternetBusin
- HarbourHeights
- WallpaperManica
- she0foreclosure
- xiaopan
- Rhonda1989
As it turns out, these were all attempts at sending me Twitter spam. My Twitter profile is public, so anyone can follow me.
To make matters worse, Twitter has no system for mass blocking profiles. I had to block each of these profiles one by one, and each block required a round trip through 5 web pages.
Adam J. O’Donnell of Cloudmark has a good ZDNet article called Twitter’s holiday battle with spammers that has some good observations.
Twitter has enough problems as it is - the service goes down for hours at a time, and has inspired users to name one of Twitter’s network outage notices as the Fail Whale.
