Entries Tagged 'Twitter' ↓

I set up all of my Twitter notifications to go to OtherInbox (awesome site–more on this in a future blog post) awhile back and I set all of the email addresses up like this:

twitter+damon @ something.otherinbox.com

This worked fine for awhile, but on November 6th (which I think corresponded to roughly the time that Twitter changed the “From” address for outgoing notification emails), I stopped receiving any notifications from Twitter. As the owner of multiple Twitter accounts, this was pretty noticeable. I finally decided to look into it about a week later.

At first, I thought that the problem may have been that OtherInbox was somehow eating the mails. I didn’t think this was the case because they actually adapted to the change of the “From” address with no problem, as I recall.

I switched the notification email to my GMail account and it worked fine. I then changed the email address to “Twitter-damon@” and those notifications went through as well. So it appears that it is currently inadvisable to use plus signs in Twitter notification email addresses. I put a support note in to Twitter, but I don’t really expect to hear much back.

Plus signs in email addresses are valid syntax, but many sites don’t support them properly (mostly because it’s just easier not to). If it really is true that Twitter is one of those sites that is intentionally not supporting them, then they need to adjust their profile save logic to disallow their use. It’s also possible that it’s just a bug.

Click the image for an example.

I used to be one of those people who would just ignore Twitter spammers. They would follow me and I wouldn’t follow them. No harm, no foul. But in the past couple of months, two things have happened which have changed my viewpoint on this.

1. Twitter Spammers (Huge Numbers of Followers, No Value Added) are increasing daily.
2. Twitter has been failing at staying up (witness the birth of a new pop culture reference, the FailWhale) and was just one tick above death during WWDC even though they would probably say that they “survived” it or they “stayed up”. Just barely, I’d say. One tick above a flatline.

If I post an update on Twitter right now, there is a decent chance that I will be followed by one or two Twitter spam accounts directly after that. As is the case with email spam, from the spammer’s side, it is all automated so what do they care? They just turn on the program and it does it all for them. I guess they build traffic from this; I don’t know. Of course if people are duped into following them back, then they then have permission to send you direct messages. Oh boy! Having never followed one of these back, I honestly don’t know if that happens, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

As has been shown by some fascinating articles that have been written recently about Twitter’s scaling issues, part of the problem is the sheer volume of messages that are needing to be delivered by the Twitter application (which was not designed to be a messaging system). As these Twitter spammers follow more and more people every day, they become a larger and larger drain on the system’s resources. As those of us who love Twitter have found out so painfully over the past months, these resources are not INFINITE. No, in fact, they are quite finite.

So, it is with these realizations that I have decided that I must actively block Twitter accounts which are abusing resources. This does my part in “cleaning up the system” and it also serves as a community marker (a la Craigslist) that denotes to Twitter that the account in question is one that should be watched more closely as a potential abuser. It also may give them a clue as to patterns, account names, URLs that are posted, IP addresses, etc., to help thwart abusers of Twitter’s resources (which in the end, affects all of us).

So please do your part. If you think that an account is spamular and is actually subtracting value from the Twitter community, let Twitter know about it. The only mechanism that we have right now to do this is BLOCK, so I’d suggest we start there.

UPDATE: I just spoke with Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter, about this and he said:

In the comments of this post, StopTwitterSpam suggested that submitting a spammer’s name here as a spam request has also been effective.

The latest version of SnapTweet now supports auto-Tweeting based on a Flickr tag. Simply go into your SnapTweet profile and save an “Auto-Post Tag”, perhaps something like snaptweet would be good. Then you just tag your photo in your mail with that tag and voila, your photo will be picked up and tweeted. For those of you who want to post everything you mail in to Flickr onto your Twitter stream, just set up a Flickr default tag to match your SnapTweet tag. Bingo bango!

Also, due to the awesomeness of the Flickr API, the all new Flickr video also works with SnapTweet automatically. Now to me, it’s that kind of magic that validates the way the app is designed to leverage Flickr and Twitter to their fullest extent. There is much more to come on that front.

In an attempt to address any burning questions you may have about the service, I’ve taken the time to write an extensive help document on SnapTweet. So please check that out for some more detail.

I really appreciate you using the service and feel free to let me know if there’s something you’d like to see. I have tons of ideas, but not a lot of time, so I am having to prioritize big time.

Technorati Tags: [Flickr],[Twitter], [TwitPic], [Twitxr], [SnapTweet]