While some accounts you’d consider spam on Twitter could simply marketing, Adam Ostrow of Mashable has been experiencing a different side of Twitter in his latest article "Twitter Spam Spirals Out Of Control".
I think it’s ironic how, for a while there, we all thought Twitter would be invincible to spam. However, for those that get email alerts about new followers, this can become an annoying problem and it seems to be growing alarmingly fast!
Adam’s proposal to the solution is:
I think the time has arrived for Twitter to require a CAPTCHA with every new follow you want to make. What do you think?
Now, CAPTCHA can be an annoying solution in itself. This will be a huge hindrance for new users of Twitter that are recommended to follow around 50-200 people once they join the service. Who on earth would like to put in a CAPTCHA code that many times? I follow around 5-10 new people everyday and I certainly wouldn’t want to put to type in a code that many times myself. This is coming from someone (me) who’s already pretty established with the Twitter service.
A solution is in order, but if you’re going for the CAPTCHA solution, I think it would be best to follow Myspace’s example and allow free reign after typing in a code correctly one or two times. Otherwise, you may have a huge problem with that in itself.
On the other hand, this is Twitter, and I don’t see any solution being implemented anytime soon. The Twitter community has been begging for various features for months! Look at how long it took to integrate a proper search feature on Twitter. Even more, that feature is not optimized the way it should be, or, it was a half-assed job!
Twitter seems more concerned with it’s looks more so than it’s enhancements. It decided to give the ‘Public Timeline’ it’s own tab. Who the hell asked for that? It was fine where it was to be honest.
Adam Ostrow has a poll on the article to get your opinions on the CAPTCHA solution.
I’d liked to know what are some other methods of control that Twitter could look into that won’t be a hindrance?
