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[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Hopefully I’m not already beating a dead horse, but since 93% of you agreed with me that it’s time for Twitter to move aggressively to prevent spam from taking over its wonderfully simple yet exploitable microblogging system, I thought I’d re-visit the subject again today.
Also of interest since Monday was a new tool sent my way by Louis Gray (who is Louis Gray?) called Twitspam. The service is being developed by Luis Figueiredo, the same programmer behind AlphaTwitter, a site for tracking popular URLs shared on Twitter. Twitspam uses some of the same technology, analyzing Twitter users who are dumping the same links over and over. So far, Twitspam seems to be doing a good job of algorithmically identifying spammers, though, Luis notes it’s a work in progress:
“The algorithm isn't finished yet, and i'm still in a data mining stage. AlphaTwitter came as a side project because it's much simpler to find out who's popular than who's self promoting a lot.”
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Another more manual approach to identifying spammers that sprung up shortly after my first story on the subject is StopTwitterSpam.com. The site is blogging about the subject, manually identifying spammers, tracking media coverage, and rather than just complaining (ahem) has a section listing proposed solutions. Appropriately, StopTwitterSpam has also setup a Twitter account to track the issue and have a dialogue about it with other users. Speaking of solutions, there were many of them proposed in the comments of my post on Monday, so be sure to check those out as well.