A common way these spammers try to get your attention, hoping you will follow them, is just start following your twitter account “at random”. Now one day I found the following two low lifers, with apparently opposite intentions, in sequence in my followers queue:

These followed me in sequence, too stupid to be true?

Now I’m pondering which one to pick, the pathetic diet promoter or the fat cheesy one?

Seriously, advice to those who create such spammy accounts: don’t waste the effort, you make me laugh at very best if I don’t outright block you.

Conversely, if you’re a human being and like to follow my sometimes random tweets, you’re still more than welcome to follow me (@jlapoutre) on Twitter!

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What the trend

Update: yes, there are more such services now, I just discovered tagdef.com which does more or less the same. And is much less complete as of late Aug. 2009. Their complementary twitter account is @newtagdefs.

Since Twitter search officially launched, Twitter trends have become an essential part to keep up with the service. These trends are shown on every search page.

Many trends are marked by the often cryptic hash tags (e.g. #www2009 stood for the WWW conference, 2009 edition.

But also regular terms emerge in the trends if people are using them often enough, for example names like Susan Boyle become real Twiter trends this way.

In many cases, looking at the trends will give you a quick impression what is hot right now in the world. But sometimes terms and hash tags are not obvious at first glance, if at all.

A new service, whatthetrend.com, has been launched to solve this problem. The site shows the latest trend terms, along with a small user-editable explanation what the trend is about. This looks a lot like the awkwardly named technorati experiment WTF (intended to be a funny acronym for where’s the fire).

Clicking on such a trend displays related tweets, news and photos, very neat.

Of course, whatthetrend comes with its own @whatthetrend twitter account which announces new trends and invites followers to explain them. And you can also use wttrend.com to save on your 140 chars limit.

I really like this service!

Some more random observations around Twitter trends

Timezones

The local timezone of an event is often very relevant for something to become a trend. Right now, #hksummit is trending (Apple event in Hong Kong, at local time somewhere afternoon). With Twitter becoming more and more popular, geographic restriction on search/trends might become useful for disambiguation and better signal to noise ratio when following local events.

Spam

Spammers are starting to abuse the popular tweet terms and post tweets with just these terms, together with their spammy links.

There is one twitter account (which I won’t mention here to avoid free publicity) which does just that: take all trend terms, convert them in a Amazon search query with affiliate code and post a tweet, many times per hour.

This was first discovered by the @paggr folks during #www2009. They are now trying to keep the spam out of their system, yet another arms race against spam has started.

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But something else happened as well: link spams started to flow in by tens per hour, while this normally was at a stable, low rate of about one a week. I think this is pure coincidence, some spammers having found a new way to massively abuse wordpress blogs. But nevertheless, it;s very annoying.

Luckily, there’s a pretty solid solution around the corner: the plugin Bad Behavior seems to catch this kind of spam very effectivel, at least for now. Let’s see how long this will stand in the spammers’ arms race.

Some links from my little research on blog spam:

• I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam is already over two years old but still valuable
• What’s the best spam filter for Word Press? opinions on LinkedIn answers
• OpenID and Spam slightly unrelated but interesting discussion whether requiring OpenID is a valid strategy for preventing abusive account creation (the so called Splogs).

The OpenID post learned me about the term Club Solution (Club vs. Lojack solutions, Mark Pilgrim). Nice!

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