Monday, December 15, 2008

Twitter search spam is getting to be a problem

It’s nothing Twitter is not aware of, I’m sure, but here’s a further anecdote.

I’ve been doodling around with a widget that rotates a number of what I think are interesting timely searches, mostly on Twitter search, but including some others.

Early last week the web was abuzz with rumors about a $99 iPhone offered by Wal-Mart, so I make it one of the widget’s searches. Each day there was more spam in the stream. I tried my best to filter it with minus switches, and finally had to give up.

I expect I’ll have to abandon the gas+price search soon for the same reason. I added another three switches today, but I have a feeling it’s just a matter of time before I won’t be able to manage it that way.

Craftier developers will know better ways to filter out certain users based on their tweet patterns and put them in 3rd party apps or in Twitter search itself. On the other hand, not putting the controls in Twitter’s public search might be a way to create value for a corporate product. But that would be scarcity thinking.