Ha, at last I started writing something about Twitter, I don’t know I was very reluctant about twitter,where the whole webworld is marching towards twitter,even Google founder in member Ram shiram is praising twitter.But at last on my friend or co-author request we created a Twitter account for Techno360(sorry Twitter account id is techno365,we didn’t get our blog name).Another silly thing is while writing this post Twitter is Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (9.30 pm ISD).
Coming to point “Spam in Twitter”, according to Sysomos report 32% of tweets are generated by bots (150 times/day), in those 24% of Tweets are spam.
Well to reduce spam all are saying one thing,so i’m also stressing that “Be Selective in Following”others. When we created an account ,with in 60 second’s we got six followers,all are from pron websites. Also don’t hurry to get followers by joining other websites which will promise to provide thousands of followers! Also read 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk at Mashable.
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5 Tools to reduce Twitter Spam
As the title itself says about it’s nature,TrueTwit distinguish real followers from bots by Captcha validation.
But Truetwit only eliminates bots,what about active human spammers ?
Link: http://truetwit.com/
thanks to pallab
TweetBlocker automatically identifies the spammers in your follow list by analyzing the behavior of the followers. It uses blacklist-style identification and Bayesian algorithm to analyze a user’s Tweets or content.
Link: http://tweetblocker.com/
Another service which has a nice, user-friendly interface that makes it easy to block followers.Twitblock a simple scanner that analyses your followers for signs of “spammy” behaviour.
Link: http://www.twitblock.org/
Twerp Scan will check the number of followers on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and then compute the ratio between how many friends/followers they have . According Twerp scan spammers follow many people say 10000,but they will have less followers . The downside you have to manually block each user or spammer.
link: http://twerpscan.com/
Clean tweets is completely different from above services. As Firefox fan i prefer Clean Tweets a Firefox Toolbar Addon, that removes spam from Twitter Search, specifically Trending Topics.
Clean Tweet erases most of the spam-based two filtering rules:
1. Delete all tweets from accounts that are less than 24 hours old (or how long you specify)
2. Any tweet that mentions 3 or more (or what you decide) trending topics.
Link: http://blvdstatus.com/clean-tweets.html
Firefox addon : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12384
I cannot say above 5 tools can completely block spam in Twitter,but they can be used for self defense.
By the way if you follow Twitter’s spam account,you can block spammer’s by sending a direct message with a spammer’s username.
Good work and some of them are new to me. There is a good news also. According to a recent report by F-Secure, Twitter is trying to implement a security system (most probably using Google Safe Browsing API) for reducing the growing worms, spam and account hijacking attack from hackers. It won’t allow to post known malware URL on twitter.
I find the best way to deal with spammers is to report them to @spam (via DM) and then block them. I don’t really use any automated tools as am worried about false positives, instead I just watch who is messaging / following me and then deal with them manually.
I did write a small script which speeds it up by doing the Reporting / Blocking for me. You can download it from my blog – http://www.aaronbassett.com/2009/report-twitter-spam/