After just a week’s experience with Twitter, I can see a real need for a spam filtering mechanism (like Akismet for WordPress). The ratio of spam to good tweets is already bad, and getting worse everyday — and that’s after just a brief experience with the service.
If not addressed soon, this could be the Achilles’ heel for mainstream adoption of Twitter as a highly valued communications platform.
In the meantime most of my friends don’t use Twitter today, so it has minimal value to me on a personal basis… It’s like the early fax machine market: you can have the best fax machine in the world, but if the people and companies you most want to reach don’t yet have fax machines themselves, you can’t communicate.
Network effects, in other words, as applied to each person’s own network. You need a critical mass within your own network to realize the benefits.
Ryan Coleman // Apr 28, 2009 at 3:30 am
If you’re getting too much spam in your stream then you’re following the wrong people. It’s like complaining about the channel you’re watching on TV having too many ads… (…then change the channel)
The beauty of twitter is you control your flow of content — if someone is sending nothing but spammy links out then unfollow them, it’s like they were never there. Unfortunately the downside of twitter is you’ve got no one to blame but yourself
Christine // Apr 28, 2009 at 10:32 am
@Ryan, thanks for your comments; however, at the time I wrote this blog post, I was only following 2 people (1 of whom I’ve since “unfollowed”). And yes, the spam has dropped as a result. Having said that, when I look at the profiles of the people who’ve asked to follow me, it’s not clear why they’re interested in following me. In most cases they’ve got a service to sell, based on their profile page.
I’ve had a couple of productive interactions via Twitter so far, but none that have yielded that feeling of “Ah ha — so this is what it’s all about.” I look forward to that moment.