Twitter gets the spammer treatment
Posted by guesto on February 2, 2009
Having decided that Twitter is now mainstream, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised to have received my first twitter-based spam today. If even mainstream brands and daytime presenters are enjoying the reach of Twitter, it’s inevitable that spammers will rolling up their pikey sleeves and flexing their dirty little fingers too.
It came in the form of a “spammerscum is now following you on Twitter” email. Naturally one clicks through to see who could possibly be interested in my drivvel, only to find a photo of a suspiciously good looking girl and a single tweet offering the chance to earn $2,000 a week working from home. I won’t include a link – lets not give them the publicity they want.
It made me think how they intend to broadcast through twitter. As they are following me, they only get to darken my inbox once if I decide to check who is following me. Thankfully they don’t get into my own updates feed, unless they @message me, which would be very time consuming.
I guess that initial single view of their page and URL is all they want really. And as there is little to stop them registering new profiles, they can just keep doing that as much as they like. Hmm, this could get messy.
Oh spammers, why do you have to go and ruin everything? Does it really ever work? Honestly?
It’ll be interesting to see what twitter do about it. It’s not exactly been built with as much protection as something like Facebook has. So they’ll probably have to start investing in upgrades to put in extra security measures and stop the few spoiling it for the rest.
Looking at that one loser’s profile, it shows that they are following 457 people, and only have 5 followers themselves, presumably them too. Perhaps a watching-to-watched ratio that unbalanced in the watching direction could trigger a spammer alert to Twitter moderation? After all, nobody can read 457 people’s updates.
So is this to be Twitter’s downfall? Is it to be a victim of it’s own success? Or are they deliberately operating a policy of allowing it for as long as possible? It certainly does fuel the success to keep it easy to signup, allow traffic (and PR) to grow.
This entry was posted on February 2, 2009 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Digital, Insights & Opinions, Rantings. Tagged: social media, spam, spammer, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Duncan said
Me, I just get US real estate agents. Every time there’s buzz about something new, the bottom-feeders flog their desperate software and pamphlets (see http://www.twittersqueeze.com for example) to still more desperate punters (and you can’t get much more desperate than US real estate right now).
Guess they’re assuming that – now the novelty’s long worn off for people opening email from anyone that sends something interesting-sounding – it’s time to get on the latest social stuff and get naive users to follow them in return. I’d say that it’s a desperate attempt to make spam economics work for Twitter but there’s a big difference between getting an email out to a couple of million people and posting a tweet to what, a couple of hundred if they’re lucky? Even Obama has less than 250k following….
guesto said
@ Duncan, yep I agree it is a time consuming strategy, so hopefully the spammers won’t bother.
And that tweet squeeze article, did you see the image of the two chicks with guns on it? Love it! http://www.twittersqueeze.com/images/twitter-squeeze-header.jpg