Home Internet A lesson about Twitter Spam

A lesson about Twitter Spam

Posted under Internet on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 by Joop Dorresteijn

Twitter is service that alllows you to send short messages to your followers. Its an easy way to know what your friends are up to and update them about your current life events. But at some point, I catched myself navigating to Twitter more and more, which made me decide to commit Twitter suicide. I unfollowed EVERYONE just like Timothy Ferris did. I couldn’t block out the people that said something to me, so I created a RSS feed to display replies in my Inbox, and got a fine overview that I read every once and a while (picture)… problem solved!

Hooked on Twitter

I was clean from Twitter! At least, so I thought… While working at the office, I found someone interesting that I wanted to follow again. I maintained my rule to ‘unfollow’ everyone and came up with the solution to add that person to my RSS reader. That seemed like a good strategy, until I discovered that I was following 10 interesting people by the next week. But it cluttered up my emails display, so I decided to follow people on Twitter again.

Twitter Spam

Last week, one of our articles generated a lot of views. I got exited with the amount of views, that I decided to tell all my friends on Twitter. Someone tipped me about a script that sends out direct messages to Twitter followers once, and I over excitedly decided to use the nifty coding to gain more views on the topic. When I send the message to the first 100 followers, I received a mail from a friend that people considered it as spam. SPAM? Then it struck to me, I was spamming my followers! Not a good idea, So I ceased to use the script again. Some of those followers, got curious about the spam message viewed my profile, to find out that I didn’t follow them back. That created quite the dialogue on Twitter, that I read on Twitter last weekend. Lesson learned about non real life contacts: People will find the information that they like, if not, sending requests to people you hardly know can create a rejection; quite the wrong reaction to your actions…

Tagged with: ,
  • Great post,
    Something you might want to try is still follow them on twiter but grab your own home page feed (that has all their posts and not those of ppl who @ them or ppl they follow) and add that to google reader.

    You might say it's transferring the mess from the inbox to google reader but it is a pretty neat way to look at things.

    As for the direct messages, you really don't need to direct message your followers, they get all your tweets anyways. Well, maybe if you want it to end up in their inbox and have it look private you do.

    Thanks for sharing your results.
    Cheers,

    Richarad
  • Cool, I'm in a screenshot, twice! Yea I have considered using a WordPress Plugin to auto update Twitter, unfortunatally two of my servers (one paid hosting the otehr a friend's) expired and died. Leaving me no out. So I'm stuck with google code till I make my own server (if you want something done right, don't use a PowerPC Mac for heaven's sake). Looks like you updated your site since I last saw it, looks good :P keep up the good work.
  • Intersting article, not sure that I will ever be at the level of needing to commit Twitter Suicide though!
    More seriously, I think twitter needs to take more serious action against real twitter spam followers...they seem to be very slow in the uptake although many people are complaining about it, all you can really do is block them or protect your tweets.
blog comments powered by Disqus