Saturday, August 29, 2009

40

Ok, I'm finally 40, doesn't feel any other than before ...

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Finally mobile

Nobody will care but this is my first blog post via a mobile device

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Spam filtering for Twitter

I decided to start a list of spam resources for Twitter, until now, I have the following:
  • first of all, I have started to draw up a preliminary request for spam filtering features in Twitter itself or in the clients and requested them on getsatisfaction (Twitter) and uservoice (Tweetdeck)
  • Tidytweet.com is a service to filter Twitter feeds, currently in private beta, looks pretty good
  • you can set up Twitter filters with Yahoo Pipes easily, I have created a few examples for this, that I will put up here later
  • Tweetblocker.com (looks ok, but is very picky about follower ratio)
if you know more spam resources for twitter let me know
twitter.com/alexlehm

Monday, August 10, 2009

Follower services may get you banned after all



I have previously mentioned that I am not a fan of follower services that require you to disclose your twitter password. I have created a test account to give this a try and registered with a few of these services.

As it turns out this is even more abusive than you would expect with the account password suddenly changed and multiple requests to reset the password, but that's not the worst of it.

Today I received an email from twitter.com that the account was suspended due to a TOS violation, for cross-posting duplicate tweets across multiple accounts. Since I haven't used the account at all that means that the repeated advertisement posts by the different services have triggered the spam heuristic of twitter.

On a side note, the account had about 500 followers and was following about 1500 users, so this was not really worth it, you can get this number of followers by normal activity without spamming.