Snowcrashing

Tired Of Spam On Twitter? It Might Soon Get Worse.

Posted on 09. Oct, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

Yesterday news broke that Twitter is in advanced talks with both Google and Microsoft to let them include Tweets in their search. The partnership could be a game-changer. The way search works today is still very 1.0 or top-down: the “importance” of a site is vastly determined by the authoritativeness and number of sites linking back to it (in meaningful ways).  But, as pointed out by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella, “Page to page links are too slow. And news can take days to get indexed. More and more news is breaking on Twitter, not Google, because it’s not real time”.

According to Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, in 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.Information overload is a serious threat to the end-user and to search engines. By adding Twitter to the equation, Google and Bing can offer real-time and relevant filters (through your circle of followers) to make search a new and compelling experience again.

So that is good news. And it might be good news also for companies who are willing to engage their customers in relevant ways because the return might be a double-boost in traffic (from Twitter and from Google). As in the case of Moonfruit, a London based website builder, who run a sweepstakes last summer on Twitter, and saw not only a 300% spike in traffic and 20% in sales, but in less than a month climbed from the fourth to the first Google position for the key-phrase “free website builder”.

But not all is good, not yet. Credibility is still an unresolved issue for Twitter. Supposedly they are working on it, and this is not one of the millions rumors on what’s next for Twittter, it’s Evan Williams saying so. A reputation system is due, soon. But as with all rankings, people find ways to game them. If 90% of emails and  25% of SMS are spam. Twitter, as we know, is not immune at all from the spam plague and spammers have been infiltrating tweets, direct messages, @reply messages and follower lists.

How does spam get into Twitter? The techniques are many and ingenious.

• Trending topics and #hastgas: To get messages in front of as many users as possible, tweet spam often includes the trending topic keywords  of the day and popular #hashtags
• Bait and Switch: since spammy pitches inside a tweet tend to be ignored,many spammers recur to the bait and switch tactic, where an embedded link goes to a site with content unrelated to the original tweet. Short URLs embedded in a tweet are used to obfuscate obvious links to spam, porn or malware sites.
• Fake retweets: Retweets may replace the original text and are then associated with a trusted name. This might soon less frequent, as Project Retweets gets rolled-out.

What has Twitter done so far to fight spam?

Twitter does regular sweeps to kill thousands of spam accounts, but new ones are opened up just as quickly — and Twitter offers only limited tools to help users clean it up. Users can block follower and report spammers by sending a direct message with the account name to Twitter’s Spam Watch account.  But the blocking mechanism is useless. People you’ve blocked can still read your timeline, retweet you, @reply you.

More safeguards need to be put in place though. Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand, has some spot-on recommendations:

• “Accounts less than a day old don’t get to show up in Twitter Search and/or show up for trending topics
• Figure a reputation score for accounts and only let those appear in for trending topics
• Partner with a service for malware detection, so that any links Twitter puts out are analyzed to be safe”

Resolving the issue of spam and credibility is critical to Twitter future. Once Twitter is inside Google, the tipping point to become a worldwide phenomenon is at hand. But there’s also a scenario where it becomes a zombieland inhabited by link farmers and spammers.

Tags: Spam, Twitter