On Internet Business

Will Spam Kill Twitter?

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Social Networking is a relatively young form of communication, but for huge numbers across the globe it’s their primary mode of communication. Still finding its feet, social networking and its ‘audience’ have been continually faddish since the birth and boom of the medium with Friends Reunited, MySpace and Bebo.

The latest big noise in this phenomenon is, of course, Twitter. Seen as a unique and independent antidote to the heavily ad-driven Facebook by its users, times may be about to change for the young upstart.

Spam has long been a blight on internet usage across the board, from personal email accounts to Facebook and Myspace, unsolicitated correspondance on all manner of products seems unavoidable.

When Twitter first launched, its unique system of Followers seemed ideal for avoiding spam appearing on your homepage. But as the popularity of the site grows, the spammers have inevitably latched on to this huge and lucrative audience. It has now been claimed that approximately 10% of Twitter messages are spam, and you only have to peruse their Trending Topics to see the sheer volume of contentless messages pushing products and services across the site. So how do they remedy the situation?

According to Christopher Peri, CEO of the Web-based third-party Twitter interface Twittfilter, “Technically what we’re now seeing is really Twitter spam 2.0. The first iteration of Twitter spam was a tweet that showed up with a picture of a pretty girl on it. You looked at it and realised you just got spammed. The second phase of Twitter spam, which we’re seeing today, is a lot harder to identify, and thus a lot harder to protect against.” Twittfilter is an interface designed to combat spammers by minimising the chances of you seeing their messages in your personal feed. They achieve this by applying a scoring system which is completely personalised to a user’s circle of friends. This makes it harder for the spammers to break into your network. Great if you’re using Twitter just like Facebook – to keep up with close friends and family, but rendered almost useless for those trying to genuinely network on Twitter.

In the past week Twitter users have, however, seen a huge drop in their follower numbers coming from the Twitter operators themselves. Far from losing faithful fans, this has been down to dramatic slashes in spam accounts from the site. By actively combatting the problem from Twitter HQ, their PR image remains on a high compared to rivals Facebook, who seem to embrace their spam-infested, ad-driven medium.

Perhaps this spammer-slaying is the best move Twitter can make. As the network gains huge popularity and gains enough credibility to achieve regular usage on Channel 4 News among other TV and Radio programmes, gaining their ‘grass roots vision’ is the only way Twitter can keep their status as the cool social networking location of the moment.

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