I Condemn Twitter To Hell
Damn Twitter to hell. The spam is out of control. You’d think it was a Hotmail inbox circa 2002. Constantly with the garbage. And I’m not even talking about all the “lets see if this trends” retweets. I’m talking about the bot nets who are abusing the API to post thousands of bullshit messages trying to get you to click to some website that has nothing to do with the message.
I was searching twitter for tweets about Ebay when I stumble on some obviously bogus tweet about how microsoft is buying ebay. The start of the tweet was a recently trending topic followed by some random celebrity name. Then I notice another about Ebay that also mentions that another random celebrity died. So I searched a phrase they both had in common. I found a page full of tweets that only spanned 3 or so minutes. Mostly different user names, all using the Twitter API to post.
It’s all garbage like: Monkey Island trend?LATEST Miley Cyrus has invaded south KOREA , OMG OMG !! earned $2,612 thanks to this to this http://tiny.cc/rYoV
Miley has been busy today. According to the same set of spam bots; she has died in a car wreck, drown in a boating accident, and invaded South Korea (poor SK).
I wait a while and look back to the screen, there are like 475 more new tweets that match my search. Those tweets all had one of three shorted URLs via another service. Unfortunately, there is no obvious easy way to report abuse. The site is designed for that sort of crowd shouting so a bot net is right at home. I wonder how many people where lured away off to fake looking youtube windows that claimed you needed a new Flash player to view or javascript or pdf or jpg exploits?
I really do see value in twitter. Or at least I’m trying. On the same note though, it’s like walking through the midway at a carnival. There’s a lot of random normal folks walking around bumping into one another and sharing a little bit of conversation. For the most part it gets drowned out by the asshole running the scam everyone’s a winner dart game though that’s $3 a dart so you can get a roach clip with some feathers or a 6″ by 6″ Bon Jovi mirror. No matter how many balloons you bust, that stuffed animal your kid wants is $30. He’s shouting all kinds of nonsense to try to trick you into getting robbed. He’s got a megaphone in the form of a bot net (or an army of over zealous fans who want to help make the trend list).
I’m going to start flapja.ws for hard core communicators that only need 70 words to share thoughts. Think of it, half the characters = half the keyword stuffing = less spam. That or double the volume of the shorter messages…
