Social Couch

I bet each and every one amongst us would have got followed by numerous porn stars and ‘make $1000 from home’ guys on Twitter. As every internet medium grows bigger one of the biggest challenges would be to combat the spam. Initially Twitter didn’t impose any follow restrictions and as the early bird gets the worm, the spammers started following thousands of people every single day so that they can increase their follower count by the way of reciprocation. The smart guys at Twitter imposed a 2000 follows per day restriction along with few other API restrictions. The growth was massive and this didn’t trouble the spammers much, thanks to hundreds of auto follow systems and scripts.

One good thing which Twitter can learn from Google is to build a Twitter spam control team. Google has an awesome spam protection team headed by Matt Cutts and they do keep under control.  Although there are some measures which Twitter has taken till now, a lot more can be done. @spam is the official spam reporting account for Twitter. If you come across a spam  account you can send a @ reply to that account. Blocking users is one other effective way but with the immense amount of spammers we get bored after a certain point. There are a few apps which will let you clean your follower/following list but the trustworthiness of the app is a big question which comes in front.

Clean Tweets Firefox addon

Recently i started using Twitter search for finding out real time search results. For example if Youtube or dreamhost goes down the first thing i do is to do a keyword search on Twitter as it gives out the up to date user powered results. The most annoying thing is the search time line is bombarded with lame marketers and spammers who promote all the possible products on earth. The Clean Tweets Firefox add on is a nice solution which eliminates some results from the search time line based on certain parameters like age of the account, number of trending topics used etc.

Protect Your Twitter Account

As an end user the best we can do is to protect our Twitter account from malicious attacks. Here are some simple steps which you can do to safeguard your account.

1. Don’t give your Password

Don’t give your Twitter username and password to an application or website at any cost. There are some trusted twitter clients which will need your password though. Make sure that you verify the authenticity of the client before letting out your credentials.

2. Remove unwanted connections

Twitter uses OAuth which is a secure method of providing access to your account information without revealing your password. Over a period of time most of users give access to a number of such services. If you are no longer using a app/service it is better to remove the connection and revoke the access.

Clicking on Settings-> Connection on your Twitter account will list all the connections and you can revoke the unwanted ones. Alternatively you can also follow this URL to go directly to the connections page. http://twitter.com/account/connections

3. Look before you Click

Don’t click on the links present in your replies or direct messages from unknown users. Clicking on these links may give access to your account to the impostor without your knowledge.

4. Block and Report

If you see a spam account following you block it and this will make sure that the replies made by the spammer will not show in your time line. Also, look before you follow !

5. Change your password

The basic and golden rule when it comes to passwords! Keep changing it once in a while and don’t use the same password across different services.

What are other ways in which Twitter can control spam? Do share it in the comments section.