I came across Sean Percival's post on "Twitter Spam":
"Twitter Spam is getting worse and worse these days. If you use Twitter like I do, and follow everyone who follows you, then you’ve probably seen a lot of crap like the above tweet... Twitter would probably acquire any company who could help them better filter spam."
This is something I highlighted in my op-ed last May in Mashable when I predicted that Twitter would go mainstream:
"When (and if) this happens, the downside will be revealed. Spamming is already present on these micro-blogging platforms, but just wait until they hit the mainstream. By the time I left Korea in 2004, a quarter of my SMS was spam, and I blamed those online SMS broadcasting services. Let’s watch what happens in the U.S. over the next few years."
Just eyeballing my Twitter stream I would say it hasn't reached the annoying levels I experienced with SMS in Korea, but Twitter penetration isn't even close to South Korea's 90%+ wireless penetration rate and its high SMS usage so the total volume and Twitter usage rate probably isn't attractive to the overall spamming market. Maybe I see 2% or less of my incoming Tweets as spam, whether hard or soft spam (hard or soft sell)? Also I probably come across a similar percentage of spam profiles, which I frequently block to help cleanse the Twitter ecosystem of these toxins.
The uptake of spam in Twitter can potentially be more rapid than SMS networks since Twitter is naturally a broadcast system and where you can accumulate contacts rapidly beyond your circle of close friends. To blast a broadcast-like message through SMS, you have to tediously enter each contact or use a third-party application.
Let's watch to see how Twitter or the Twitter ecosystem deals with the spam problem as it become more ubiquitous.
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