Comments on: 'Why are you ruining Twitter?'

A talk with the creator of Spymaster, which sends out silly game progress notes on behalf of its users. Plus: How to block the notes.

[realmerlyn]

Within the first 12 hours, 3 of the 3000 people I follow sent me spymaster requests. Thank goodness for the optout page. This is spam in the first degree.

[gsekse]

WHY do you follow 3000 people!?!?! if only 10% tweet once a day... That is useless information overload to the max.

[ikramerica--2008]

Twitter is going to become more spam ridden than email in very short order to the point that people will move on to something else. This is one trend I'm skipping. All you twits have fun with your toy until it breaks. :)

[Gabey8]

I haven't had any Twitter friends get started on this or any other auto-tweet-generating activity. If they do, either twitter.com will add a filter to block those tweets, or I will end up using some other Twitter client that lets me filter unwanted content.

[babysprite]

I'm just waiting for some malicious individual to code up a "twitter bomb" and sent it out to the script kiddies.

[cvaldes1831]

Mobile Twitter clients will need to provide antispam capabilities too if Twitter is going to have any hope for survival. Twitter itself doesn't appear to be designed to scale sanely (every day I'm deleting several followers who are plain scammers); I tried nearby searches and the cacophony is absolutely deafening.

[socialized]

Rafe, thanks for a great piece. I think your first tip so clearly identifies the biggest problem with Twitter: Everything is a workaround. Multi-account support, spam filtering, tags (aka hashtags), extended profile search, etc. are all features Twitter ought to have but doesn't.

[toumei64]

I'll be glad when Twitter is history; knew it would get to this point before long...

[WeCanDoBIZ]

It is indeed things like SpyMaster and all those "get 16,000 followers in 30 days" things that are likely to drive Twitterers away. Which is a shame, as it was good before it got mainstream ironically.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

[diboo19]

Twitter has been blacklisted by Chinese government...

[David Gerard]

I find it a very useful mechanism to unfollow the idiots spamming my list with this rubbish and telling them why. Discovering that you get game points for spamming Twitter strengthens my resolve.

[codynews]

I'm still shocked when I find someone I know in real life that uses twitter. Twitter is total hype. Not a day goes buy a where a twitter story isn't front page on cnet.

Cody

[darfjono]

my god, enough with the articles on twitter.

[swanwick]

I have been thinking about the growth of SPAM on Twitter. As soon as I saw the existence of SpyMaster, I knew it was time for a blog post: http://bit.ly/pyi09

The fact that you can SPAM on Twitter does not make it an inherently bad tool, it just means that we need to adjust in order to find the use that works for us. Where there are enough people with a similar need (eg. filtering), people/companies will build products that help us.