Living in a digital world

Is the twitter tide turning?

I love twitter. It’s where I get my news. It’s where I stay on top of innovation in my industry. It’s where I find case studies and great pieces of creative. I use it to find influencers and track conversations. It’s a great tool. I even used it recently to succesfully source two Lovebox tickets an hour before the sold out event.

But there’s been a few things happening on twitter recently that have started to take the shine off. The first is ‘porn/dating site’ followers: all these fake followers who simply want to drive clicks to porn and dating sites, etc. I get followed by about four of these leeches every day. Blocking them is annoying – I’m busy enough already.

Then there’s all the z-list brands trying to game trending topics. I’m fed up of searching a trending topic only to find dozens of tweets full of all that day’s trending topic hashtags mashed together like “#gijoe #ladygaga #iranelection #obamahealthcare #bestdressedguy #AT&T at cli.gs/g5ZATg“. Stop it already. That link (not from a real spammer) by the way is to a really nice data visualisation.

Now even worse are the sponsored tweet brigade. A new industry of start-ups offering cash in return for branded tweets – apparently paying $35 dollars a tweet if you have 10,000 followers. How soon before we’re deluged by tweets from ‘followers’ prepared to send all kinds of irrelevant 140 character branded messages in return for a fistfull of dollars.

Obviously this was all going to happen eventually. And obviously there’s going to be worse still to come: possibly even supported by Twitter itself as the business tries to monetise its service. It’s depressing nonetheless, no? Who wants to be part of a real-time spam conversation, who wants real-time spam search, who wants real-time spam trending topics?

So, here’s my plea to twitter, find a way to stop the rot before it starts alienating your users. Limit #hashtags to one per tweet. Block the IP’s of spam twitterers. Do something. Anything. I don’t want to be invited to do unspeakable things to fake followers anymore.

August 11, 2009 Posted by riksta | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment