Thank You Twitter For Cleaning House, But…

Occasionally I have to give kudos and this one was about time. I have no issues about how many followers I have. When I hit 9000 the other day I was shocked. I am still humbled that anyone would want to occasionally drop on in to see my tweets. However, I do enjoy connecting, which is something I say a lot. Others were frantic and getting a little peeved. I shook my head and laughed about it as it told me how much they lost track of quality, not quantity. Even if 600 people unfollowed purposely, it should not matter unless the person did something to alienate their followers.

When Twitter did their cleanup, I lost over 600 followers, all were accounts that I did not need. Why? Well, because they were spammers. No one likes spamming… or do they. I certainly do not. It is not their first cleanup, but it is certainly one that was much needed as Twitter mentioned follower counts were not accurate. With Twitter going mainstream, loads of spammers have been piling in and barfing their garbage onto the micro blogging stream. Yeah, that sounded nasty, but it is true.

Although I agree with TechCrunch’s article ( Twitter Cracks Down On Spam Accounts, People Lose Followers ) and their mention of the spam problem on Twitter, my issue is the teenie boppers starting pointless and spammy-looking trending topics that climb to the top. Hey Twitter, even though you cut those trending topics off the top trending topics list, could you cut the dumb kids doing it too? Some of them are ‘repeat offenders’ like @dfizzy (whom I refuse to link.) I would prefer seeing relevant trending topics. Some of the cute saying ones that you can participate in like #3drunkwords are harmless. It is the trending topics that have no value at all but to call unwanted attention, which is a part of the definition of spam. They are part of the problem that made Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails get so pissed off that he deleted his Twitter account – @trent_reznor.

And what about those sites that people can sign up for you to get an X amount of followers. In return, your Twitter account automatically tweets their message at least once a day, or in my findings, possibly more. I find it quite annoying seeing the same message from several people. The sad thing is that most of them when you inform them that it really does not work, they apparently did not read the site nor take note of opting out of the site. The messages enough are spam as they seem to be tweeted almost at the same time of day. So, I could see 5 or 10 of them. Some of these accounts, that is pretty much what their stream is all about. What about these people… are they spam, Twitter?

What do you think? What should Twitter considered besides obviously spam?