The battle against Twitter spam

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.

Tagged as: networking, reliability, social, spam, twitter