Wow, twammers. I'm almost impressed. Nearly a 1:1 following:followed ratio, and some 1700+ followers at that. Believable Twitter updates, AND a blog backing the profile! Though bad grammar, capitalization and syntax are found throughout the text, it's sadly believable as the product of a child of the SMS generation.
Of course, turning to the blog, it's a spamblog/link farm. The supposed owner of the blog's pictures link to an adult dating site. And yet again, the screen name, "MichelleLoli," doesn't exactly match the alleged actual name, "Stefi Tossie."
Here's an account I followed for a while, where the person/people behind the account actually seem to interact with the other people the account follows. No actual conversations, but occasional, relevant, one-liner @ replies to something you said. Maybe the woman behind it really does Tweet, and she's just a really busy pornstar/dominatrix ... or maybe it's a half-hearted effort to pump traffic to the pornstar's site by some cheapo marketing firm or seospammers. Bambibot, or no?
Showing posts with label twam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twam. Show all posts
Friday, September 25
Thursday, September 3
New Twist on Twam
Noticing a scary twitterspam trend these past couple weeks: bambibots and other spambots on Twitter are getting a lot more subtle. A few months back, you saw them spewing out random bits of text obviously taken from other sources, but those bits were often fragments, and the following:followed ratio was hundreds:1 or worse. Account names were still pretty obviously simple enumerations or iterations.
This week, I'm seeing spambot accounts with reasonable following ratios, believable names, and bits of text that would almost make sense as entire thoughts or sentences, if you didn't understand that a word like "uni" for "school" or "college" wouldn't be used by a girl in Louisiana, particularly not in the middle of August.
Big giveaway: name reads "Kayla," Ms. 'Claire.' Ooops!
The linkspam volume has died down. You could almost believe it's a real account, not just a broadcast mouthpiece for porn, SEO and MLM links.
One giveaway the nasty spammers seem to fail to be dealing with: the source parameter. Without an officially registered app, the source parameter describing the app that a tweet was sent from is going to be displayed as "From API." Not "From Web." Not "From Tweetdeck" or "From Seesmic" -- "From API."
With OAuth, there's no reason for legitimate users to be calling in over Basic Auth anymore -- no reason a legit user should be displaying "From API" -- certainly not with any regularity.
Developers: register your app, use the freely available OAuth libraries that are proliferating, and deal with the occasional OAuth downtime.
Thursday, August 13
The Bambibots Cometh
OK, so what exactly is the deal with bambibots? You know, that subset of spambots that haunt social networks, post a sexy photo and spew out lascivious crap like "I hate my [boy/girl]friend you need to cum f*ck me now www.obviouspornlink.com/ghg43p993p4" ???
Do people really click on this crap? I guess they must, because like the slew of email spam that clogs my pipes, someone puts an awful lot of effort into creating these spambots to drive these Bambi/Amber/Monik/Jezabelle/Irinia53530/so on and so forth accounts, and if there weren't a financial incentive, it simply wouldn't make sense. I wish there were a better way of blocking them.
A few weeks back I'd posted a suggestion on the Twitter development list about tunable anti-spam measures -- like the kind of utility that GMail gives you. Once I start blocking accounts, there ought to be some intelligent algorithms working behind the scenes to understand stuff like:
1. if someone is following hundreds or thousands and is followed by a handful, ignore,
2. if someone has had no conversational interaction with any other account, ignore,
3. if the "person's" photo is of them in a bikini, ignore,
4. if there's a link to any known porn site, off a list, or as recongized by other users, ignore!
5. if the words "SEO" or "empowerment" or "money" or "cash" or "prizes" or "smoke up my butt" is found anywhere on their page, IGNORE!!
I mean c'mon ... Twitter's made some strides in spam control, but they're far from where they need to be. I'm tried of waking to find my inbox filled with followspam. Aren't you?
Do people really click on this crap? I guess they must, because like the slew of email spam that clogs my pipes, someone puts an awful lot of effort into creating these spambots to drive these Bambi/Amber/Monik/Jezabelle/Irinia53530/so on and so forth accounts, and if there weren't a financial incentive, it simply wouldn't make sense. I wish there were a better way of blocking them.
A few weeks back I'd posted a suggestion on the Twitter development list about tunable anti-spam measures -- like the kind of utility that GMail gives you. Once I start blocking accounts, there ought to be some intelligent algorithms working behind the scenes to understand stuff like:
1. if someone is following hundreds or thousands and is followed by a handful, ignore,
2. if someone has had no conversational interaction with any other account, ignore,
3. if the "person's" photo is of them in a bikini, ignore,
4. if there's a link to any known porn site, off a list, or as recongized by other users, ignore!
5. if the words "SEO" or "empowerment" or "money" or "cash" or "prizes" or "smoke up my butt" is found anywhere on their page, IGNORE!!
I mean c'mon ... Twitter's made some strides in spam control, but they're far from where they need to be. I'm tried of waking to find my inbox filled with followspam. Aren't you?
Friday, May 16
Why Twitter Matters
If Business Week says so it must be so, right?
Quite rightly calling Twitter the "microblogging rage," BW also acknowledges the inescapable "drivel." It's true -- as a lifestreaming-leaning medium, there's plenty of noise (even without considering the Twam.) Plenty of very interesting people have unfortunately unfollowed me due to my own loquacious use of the service.
More importantly, BW touches on some of the bottom line, business-relevant facts of Twitter. Traffic has blown up. Major corporations are using it to enhance their relationship with their customers (Comcast, H&R Block, Hormel) and increase sales (Dell). A rich ecology of third party apps thrives on top of it.
BW also touches on a topic near and dear to the hearts of all Twitterers -- the not-infrequent service outages. Some have blamed this on Twitter's Ruby on Rails platform; the recent departure of chief architect Blaine Cook, Ruby evangelist extraordinaire, has left the question of technological direction wide open.
Twitter's major backer right now is Union Square Ventures; you can find partner Fred Wilson on Twitter daily. With a history of investments including del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!) and Feedburner (acquired by Google for ~$100 million USD) and a current portfolio including Etsy and tumblr, you have to think these guys have this thing down.
That said, BW brings up that other favorite Twitter topic -- monetization. What's the model for a microblogging service? The new Japanese-localized Twitter is experimenting with advertising. With the incredible number of third party apps, you'd have to think Twitter begs to go freemium. But the question remains: what the heck IS Twitter worth?
Twitter isn't a fad. It isn't just a trendy toy. It's a tool and a platform that adds value to any business that needs to communicate, whether that's with a community, with clients, with partners, with suppliers or with talent. Twitter is here to stay.
UPDATE: Excellent traffic stats and analysis available at the Compete blog.
Some highlights:
Quite rightly calling Twitter the "microblogging rage," BW also acknowledges the inescapable "drivel." It's true -- as a lifestreaming-leaning medium, there's plenty of noise (even without considering the Twam.) Plenty of very interesting people have unfortunately unfollowed me due to my own loquacious use of the service.
More importantly, BW touches on some of the bottom line, business-relevant facts of Twitter. Traffic has blown up. Major corporations are using it to enhance their relationship with their customers (Comcast, H&R Block, Hormel) and increase sales (Dell). A rich ecology of third party apps thrives on top of it.
BW also touches on a topic near and dear to the hearts of all Twitterers -- the not-infrequent service outages. Some have blamed this on Twitter's Ruby on Rails platform; the recent departure of chief architect Blaine Cook, Ruby evangelist extraordinaire, has left the question of technological direction wide open.
Twitter's major backer right now is Union Square Ventures; you can find partner Fred Wilson on Twitter daily. With a history of investments including del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo!) and Feedburner (acquired by Google for ~$100 million USD) and a current portfolio including Etsy and tumblr, you have to think these guys have this thing down.
That said, BW brings up that other favorite Twitter topic -- monetization. What's the model for a microblogging service? The new Japanese-localized Twitter is experimenting with advertising. With the incredible number of third party apps, you'd have to think Twitter begs to go freemium. But the question remains: what the heck IS Twitter worth?
Twitter isn't a fad. It isn't just a trendy toy. It's a tool and a platform that adds value to any business that needs to communicate, whether that's with a community, with clients, with partners, with suppliers or with talent. Twitter is here to stay.
UPDATE: Excellent traffic stats and analysis available at the Compete blog.
Some highlights:
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