JasonMorrison.net

It was inevitable. As Twitter has grown and started pushing into the mainstream, spammers have started ramping up abuse. At first glance, Twitter isn’t the most obvious target – you actually have to follow someone to get content from them, users don’t generally search it for high-cpc stuff like meds and lawyers, and how much spam can you really get into 140 character messages?

But I’m seeing more invites from users like the one below:

First: What is Twitterspam? How do I know this is a spammer?

When it comes to spam, most people “know it when they see it,” but it’s helpful to look at the specific signals that this user might not be worth talking to. First off, they have 180 followers and yet haven’t posted a single update. The photo is a dead giveaway. The bio is actually pretty well-done, it’s in English and it’s not outlandish, but the homepage link (http://my-pictures.no.tp/tlow/) – she’s in Portuguese Timor?

Second: Why spam Twitter?

Spammers have two reasons to abuse Twitter: monetary payoff, and because it works.

How can they make money by tweeting a bunch of random people? Well in this case they aren’t, at least not yet. The payoff has to be through the homepage link, which I’m not following and you shouldn’t either. You get a friend invite on a system that, so far, has been a medium of immediate, short, personal communication. Your trust barriers thus weakened, you at least want to see who it is. They don’t have any updates yet, so you click the homepage link and… Virus. Or a maze of PPC affiliate pages and redirections.

Above I said spammers are hitting Twitter because it’s working. How do I know? Look at the number of followers, and the ratio of people followed to followers. About 22 percent of the people spammed so far have responded. I don’t know how many click through to the home page link, but if half the people bother to go that far they’ve got an amazing success rate for spam.

I wish Twitter luck. I know a few people over there, they’ve got their work cut out for them. This sort of thing isn’t easy to fight, it’s an ongoing process. They’ve already taken some visible steps, like using rel=”nofollow” on the Bio link, which at least keeps away blackhat SEOs looking for sources of pagerank. They’ll probably have to do more, most of it on the backend where you and I will never be the wiser. Happy spamfighting!

Ann and I ended up in the news again today, this time in a New York Post article about Twitter. I used Twitter to send out updates on what was going on during labor. I’m probably not the first to do it, but it’s an interesting use case for an article like this, aimed at introducing some new tech that’s been popping up more and more in popular culture.

But when I noticed the accompanying photoillustration I had to post this screenshot. Notice anything a little off?

Click here to see the full-sized screenshot. The caption text seems to imply that it’s a photo of Ann. For those of you who don’t know us personally, Ann’s not actually a white person like miss stock photo here.

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I happened to notice Brian’s tweet that he is officially the sole authority on burritos in Twitter, at least according to Wefollow, a Twitter user directory.

Twitter is the only major service I can think of where sites have popped up to provide a function so basic as user directories. This is due in part to their great API, but also because they don’t provide any real functionality on their site. You can search for users individually and import your contacts, but the suggested user page seems uselessly weighted toward the most popular people on the entire site.

Who should I follow if I’m interested in usability or cartography or legume horticulture? I took a look at a few directories, which follow slightly different models:

justtweetit.com
- Has a list of predefined categories
- Each user can only be in one category
- Users are self submitted

wefollow.com
- Users can be tagged by any word or phrase, though the most popular show up as main categories on the home page
- Each user can use up to three tags
- Users are self submitted

twellow.com
- Has predefined categories, a large list that looks similar to Open Directory.
- Each user can be in up to 10 categories
- Seems to pick up users automatically, but users can add themselves to additional categories

My guess is the more specific the categories, the more useful the organization system will be. Wefollow gets points here for allowing open tagging but the front page, with such broad categories, isn’t as useful as the search or drill down pages. Twellow actually works pretty well, since the built-in category list is so extensive.

All three seem like they might be a bit open to abuse, since users can add themselves to the directory – with Twellow and Wefollow, at least they have to be logged in to their account to do so. But if I were a spammer and had found some way to use Twitter for spam, I could quickly add my spam accounts to these sites as well.

It would be really interesting to see a measure of quality other than just the number of followers. For example, if I say I’m in the haberdashery business, the system could check to see how often haberdashery shows up in my tweets – that could be a quality score for the classification, used in concert with number of followers, which is a proxy measure for the quality of my account.

Has anyone else used these directories, or others? Would you follow someone just because they’re the most popular person listed in your area of interest? Let me know in the comments below.

I’ve been known to do geeky things.  For one, I’ve been experimenting with putting parts of my life on the web live via Twitter.  For another, I’ve been going to a 30-hour science fiction movie marathon with friends for the past 14 years.

It’s time to merge the two together in a Twitter Experiment this weekend.  Starting on Friday, 7 p.m. EST I’ll be posting updates to Twitter about the movies, ridiculous sci-fi plot devices, funny cracks from the crowd, and the general movie marathon experience.

Now for some questions and answers:

Q:  How can I follow along?

A:  Follow me on Twitter and watch the snippets roll in.  Alternatively, if you’re connected to me on Facebook you can watch my status updates, it’s the same thing.

Q:  I’m going to be there, how can I participate?

Let me know in the comments below, we’ll make it a thing.

EDIT:  Use hashtag #marathon34 in any Tweets.

Q:  Why would anyone have even the slightest interest in this?

A:  The CWRU Science Fiction Marathon is really an excuse for a bunch of sarcastic people to shout insults and rejoinders at a movie screen.  It’s like a huge, live-action, sleep-deprived version of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Q:  No, I mean why would anyone have the slightest interest in you going to a movie marathon?

A:  Point taken, its not like I’m famous or anything (outside of being temporarily internet famous in Australia, of course).  Luckily many of my readers are friends, colleagues, and a bit geeky themselves. If you’re going to get a tiny-text-snippet tour through a science fiction marathon, though, I might as well be your guide – I have a fair knowledge of the genre, I used to be a movie reviewer, and I like to make sarcastic comments.

Q:  How is this possible?

A:  An iPhone, and WiFi or the regular data connection, that’s how.  I might also play around with my G1 phone with Android a bit.  If my connectivity fails for some reason, I reserve the right to basically give up and pretend I never even mentioned it.

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One other thing I just can’t leave out of this post – when I mentioned this to my coworkers, they poked fun.  My coworkers at Google.  That’s right, I’m officially too geeky for Google.

When we were looking for hospitals and doctors offices for little Athena, wifi wasn’t really on the list so much as reputation, compatibility with our insurance, and other concerns.  In retrospect, though, thank goodness Stanford Hospital and Palo Alto Medical Foundation have wifi.

We live more than 2,000 miles from most of our family.  Not all of them could make the flight to California for the birth.  We also have too many friends around the country to possibly make all the phone calls we’d have liked to have made that night.  In addition, we had several thousand people all over the world wondering which name we would pick for our baby.

Because of internet connectivity, I was able to do a fair job of including all of them in the process:

1) With my iPhone, I was able to take and post photos during labor and delivery.  Photos of my mom’s new granddaughter were available for her, on Flickr, within minutes of birth:

I’m not sure I can properly express here how much it meant to her and the rest of our family to be able to see Athena so quickly.

2)  Using the Twitterific App on my iPhone was was able to post updates to Twitter throughout the whole labor.  This is a perfect example of what Twitter is good for.  Liveblogging while my wife endures the pains of childbirth would be ridiculously insensitive, but there were always minutes of downtime here and there to tap out a few words describing what’s going on.

3)  Using the Twitter App for Facebook, my updates showed up on my Facebook status as well.  This was a big help, since so many more friends and family use Facebook than Twitter.

A fourth option, which we didn’t use but might have had the labor been longer, was videoconferencing with Skype.  We’ve been using Skype to keep in touch with family for some time.  It is currently my grandmother’s favorite thing to do.  Since we’ve been back home Athena has become the star of many family video sessions.

One final thing I have to mention is YouTube – we certainly weren’t going to share the gooey miracle of life with the world in streaming video, but my wife followed the videos fo several other women during pregancy up to and including labor.  We don’t know a lot of other couples having kids right now, so that gave Ann a personal connection with their stories and helped her through some of the tougher times during the last 9 months.  She could see that other people were going through the same things she was and that was an important comfort.

The common theme here, which I think goes a long way toward explaining the growth of the internet as a whole, is communication.  Because of almost universal connectivity, we were able to turn a deep personal experience into a social experience as well.