Twitter a spam free zone - yeah right....

Proof that hope springs eternal in the human breast, this article on Twitter being a spam free zone is yet another example of touchingly naive optimism (thanks for link via Howard Lindzon - via Twitter of course).

Sez Russel Beattie:

Think about any other online community system ever created - from Usenet to The WELL, IRC to Slashdot to Digg. All of them have had to deal with the core problem of idiots on the Internet. Slashdot's extended karma system, or IRCs multiple moderation commands, Digg's diggs, etc. are all about filtering out the assholes. It's a fact - anytime a virtual group gets to a certain size, the morons come and start doing their best to disrupt, defraud or degrade the audience.

Twitter, however, has almost a million members, a thriving community, lots of discussions and yet doesn't have spam or troll issues. If you step back for a second and think about it, that's pretty amazing.

The fascinating thing is timing - last night a few people were starting to talk about the rise of spam on Twitter. Right now we can see 3 types:

(i) "A List" Spam - some influential bloggers use Twitter as a broadcast system to blog (blag?) about every post, activity etc they are involved in. Much of this is purely an attempt to sell (flog) their wares.

(ii) "Z List" Spam - people who have such a high post rate that you just have to turn them off

(iii) And now, the rise of Twitter Spambots - this was what we were discussing last night, ie a number of people are seeing spambots (or spampeople - on Twitter its hard to tell) who tend to follow huge numbers of people but have no following themselves, and are probably scraping data all the while, and (the topic of conversation last night) some people are starting to see the first Spam swallows of a Spam summer.

Sadly, PR/marketing spam kills most of the things we love once it they get big enough to be worth going after, and Twitter's privacy controls etc are still so rudimentary (You have to turn off all @ comms for example), that it is fairly easily spammable - it just hasn't been worth doing it until recently, but now its getting big, spam will most surely come.