
Spamming Twitter Is Now Easier Than Ever - wheels
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/02/10/spam-twitter/
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jballanc
Ok, so let me get this straight...

Spammer on Twitter: "Hey, let me tell you all about these products I want to
sell you!"

Me: "No"

Spammer: "..."

What's that? Oh, yeah, I didn't follow the spammer, SO I NEVER HEARD FROM THEM
AGAIN! Does that mean that there won't be twitter spam? that spammers won't
target twitter? Of course not...

...but personally, I welcome twitter spam! Please, bring it on! Spam is all
about finding that sucker born in the last minute who will buy your breast
enlarging viagra penis pump. The only way to be spammed on twitter is to be
enough of a sucker to follow someone trying to sell you stuff. Sounds like a
match made in heaven.

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geuis
You can't spam on Twitter. The reason I say this, and some will disagree, is
based on where your attention stream is.

In your inbox, that's where your attention stream exists. When something new
pops in, you check. The reason email spam works is because it inserts itself
into your stream. Whether you actually go and click through on whatever's it
is your own damn fault though.

The reason that "spam" in the context of email can't exist on Twitter is
precisely because you have an on/off switch for who's allowed to post into
your attention stream. I used to follow Robert Scoble because he's
interesting. But yammers on constantly about the most inane crap that it
completely floods out the interesting stuff. Its like the man has ADD and a
neural mind-reading prosthesis hooked up to a keyboard. Anyway, the point was
that he was "spamming" me in a way, so I turned him off. Instantly my
attention stream went from murky and muddy to useful again.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
I think the issue is more that they're polluting the social network and the
quality of links.

I'd bet that most of the "followers" that these bots attract are other bots
that auto-follow anyone who follows them. Nevertheless, that increases the
number of pages with a link to their site, from a high page-ranked site, and
thus they profit. That's obnoxious and rude, to say the least.

This kind of noise isn't nearly as offensive to the service-user as email spam
(for exactly the reasons you mentioned). However, Twitter could potentially be
an interesting data set for study and experimentation, and these schmucks are
souring the integrity of that data. Link-spamming is basically just a special
case of this kind of general data-abuse.

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herval
I never got any spam on Twitter. Get a dozen follower invitations once in a
while, when I post something, from people I never heard of (spam bots,
probably). So I just ignore them. Don't even bother reading their profiles to
check if they're actual interesting people or just bots trying to sell me
stuff to enlarge specific parts of my body...

