Every day I get two or three new followers on my Twitter. More often than not, these new followers are what I would classify as spam accounts. When I began to tweet, I would courageously report these followers to Twitter as spam accounts and soon enough they were removed and deleted from the internets.
Now though I rarely report users that follow me. Even if they are truly spammy and not just some start-up company wanting friends. And do you know why? One reason and one reason alone; my follower count increases by one.
On Twitter it seems that if you have plenty of followers, you are recognised as more interesting and real people are more likely to follow you. So in reality for each follow spam I receive, I secretly want them to not be reported as spam accounts and to bump up my follower count for as long as possible.
Twitter couldn’t really change my behaviour unless it actually proved useful to me to actually report these accounts. At the moment, reporting a spammer reduces my follower count so it’s actually detrimental to do so. Even if they didn’t increase my follower count in the first place until that spam user had passed some process to officiate themselves, it would still be useless to report because “oh, someone else will do that”.
On the other hand, Eli Dourado has had a great idea to incentivise the process of reporting spammers. He puts forward the notion of increasing the likelihood of you showing up in the recommended users list when you correctly identify spam accounts on a regular basis. This I think would greatly increase the reporting of spam accounts, at least for me anyway, and thus have a great impact on the spam that fills Twitter on a day-to-day basis.
In my opinion, it is a great idea but yet it still requires some user interaction (the process of reporting spam accounts). If we look at another medium which battles with spam on an even greater level, email, we find that emails are filtered by our own chosen provider. Gmail have their own algorithms for filtering spam, as do Windows Live Mail and Yahoo!, as do many thousands of other providers. Spam protection for email inboxes is not a new ingenious idea; it’s an absolute requirement.
Could this then be a way of dealing with Twitter spam? Could Twitter become its own protocol with different providers providing different degrees of spam protection, privacy, security, analytics, or premium services? Could Twitter providers of the future trim our timeline for us by allowing us to view only interesting tweets based on the context? Gmail has introduced a Priority Inbox for your email which, based on the context of the email, categorises the email to varying degrees of importance. If the email is directed solely at you, it has a greater importance than a newsletter that is sent to thousands of other people. Could a new Twitter provider highlight the most important or interesting tweets to you?
Allowing third-party clients to communicate with Twitter has been one of Twitter’s compelling features, by allowing users to choose any client that they wish. Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Hootsuite and many more allow users to plug-in and use Twitter in their own way, however they are severely limited to Twitter’s own API which offers no extra benefits such as context analysis or analytics. Implementing a Twitter feed provider would be a huge cost to Twitter and would effectively outsource their own ad revenue to other companies.
For many years Twitter’s fail whale has shown to millions of users when the service is overloaded or breaks for some reason. Or in fact even worse when Twitter is blocked to an entire country when tweeting the truth is deemed a huge security risk. These things would surely be rectified by implementing a Twitter protocol and allowing third-party providers to display, analyse, post to Twitter in their own way. It would also encourage competition in the market place where other micro-blog services would have the opportunity to offer more than the behemoth of Twitter.
This has all been simply written up over my lunch break and I’ve hardly had time to really contemplate what I’m suggesting so the idea may seem terse and undeniably infeasible but from what I can see, I can draw some similarities between Twitter and good ol’ email and can see some future in providing Twitter in a way which is more open and diverse. Perhaps this could call for a new micro-blogging format akin to diaspora* that uses collections of server nodes to share information.
Either way, I think that Twitter will eventually have to combat their spam problems or become so overridden with spam that users will at some point give up and leave the site completely. Nah, actually what am I even talking about? How else is anyone going to know how much the world just ♥’s Justin Bieber?
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