[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep because my Blackberry kept blinking red, indicating a new message. Alas, it wasn’t that Microsoft and Yahoo was finally official or some other major piece of big-time breaking tech news, [img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""] but instead, every few minutes, I was receiving notification of a new follower on Twitter.
While I’d love to attribute this to my growing influence in social media (one can dream, right? ;) ), the reality is that most of my new followers were spammy, commercial accounts who were adding new people to their follow list in bulk. For example, Satellite TV for PC (screenshot to the right) is now following 97 people, with only 2 re-follows. Their account is nothing but advertising and links.
It’s a problem I brought up a few weeks ago in my post “Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam Problem?,” and today, it looks like that problem has arrived on a fairly massive scale. I tweeted about what I was noticing earlier this afternoon, and within minutes had replies from several of my 600 or so followers indicating they were experiencing the same thing. Here’s a sampling of the tweets back to me:
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
I think the time has arrived for Twitter to require a CAPTCHA with every new follow you want to make. What do you think?
n{democracy:128}