In the WTF department comes news that Twitter (the company) wants to integrate Twitter (the service) into an unscripted reality/game show.
From the article: “The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.”
WTF? A Twitter game show where you stalk celebs?
From Mashable and Yahoo/AP via @chrispirillo via @KimSherrell via @mashable (whew!)
The one thing that twitterers fear is a fatal influx of spammers as the popularity of the service grows. Right now it’s a fairly clean service, and the ability to easily block users makes it a challenge for spammers to get a foothold. This doesn’t mean that some are not trying. So to address this a new website has popped up, the Twitter Black List. The service uses a formula that calculates the follow/follower ratio for a user and grades them as:
1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer.
Another tool, Twitter Twerp Scan uses similar logic to scan your followers and make suggestions on who to block.
Unfortunately going by this ratio alone you are going to catch a lot of legit users. Lets not forget Scobleizers’ advice that it’s not who follows you, it’s who you follow. Heck, going by this criteria I’m amost a spammer. The problem with the Blacklist is that it seems to lable people as “… known spammers and other morons on Twitter…” without any reguard to the content they post. Sure, some of the posts are mundane, but I would not lable someone like flyaxe as a spammer. The guy follows several thousand people sure, but a spammer? I have a hard time with the concept that a person should get the ban hammer just because they follow a lot of people. This is how some people choose to use twitter, it doesn’t harm the people they follow, and if they are not spamming you, who cares? If we are going to scrutinize based on a follow/follower ratio, wouldn’t it make more sense to go the other way and take a harder look at people who are followed by way more people than they follow?
While I agree that a blacklist of twitter-spammers is a good thing, probably approaching necessary, some logic other than just an arbitrary ratio of followers needs to be used to determine who is a spammer and who is just trying to get the most out of twitter. A more indepth analysis of tweets is needed, and without some other info (such as Blocked stats for users) it probably can’t be automated. The only tell-tale way to tag a spammer would be to look at links in tweets, but how to do you sort out the spammers from the Scobleizers or mashables?
Cranky Geek John C. Dvorak has [finally] joined Twitter. Is this a sign of the end times or another sign of Twitter’s growing popularity?
You can follow him at http://twitter.com//therealdvorak
…to be posting about my cool new Nokia N95 that arrived Friday. Hoped. Unfortunately FexEx had other ideas. Seems that the phone came Signature Required on their ground service. Since their ground service packages don’t go “back to station” I couldn’t run by afterwork and pick it up. So my new phone is spending it’s weekend in the back of parked FedEx Ground truck, and I’m cranky.
This is all Scoble’s fault. His cool Qik videos pushed me over the edge in buying the N95. The specs on the phone are insane, and the software available for it just make it an unbelievable device. Guess I’ll post more about it on Monday. Either that or I’ll be on the news as the insane guy chasing a FedEx truck! In the mean time check out Qik.com at www.qik.com
