DISQUS

Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

  • kylejudkins · 8 months ago
    Excellent post. I always here about your use of Yahoo Pipes on Marketing Over Coffee. It is very exciting to see exactly how to make one. Keep em coming!
  • BobGoyetche · 8 months ago
    a great tip with all the detail needed to make it work - thanks for sharing this!
  • Ari Herzog · 8 months ago
    Short of running some Yahoo Pipes from code other people wrote, I don't know the animal. Like Bob wrote, thanks for the detail! How does one write against the API? :)
  • Christopher S. Penn · 8 months ago
    That's trickier - check out the API wiki - linked at the bottom of every Twitter page.
  • MarinaMartin · 8 months ago
    Love the concept, but I take issue with the terms you chose as the marks of a spam tweet. I'm sure I have tweeted "Whew, just finished a long new blog post!" or something of the sort ... and there are perfectly legitimate people who share a blog post they wrote every once in awhile preceded by "New Blog Post:" Non-spammers could also tweet "Need some way to make more money" as a vent and not as a scam invitation.

    You can definitely use this method to find people who might throw up red flags, but I'd refrain from doing it automatically, as then it would have automatically unfollowed you, according to Summize: http://tinyurl.com/cttjsu

    Even a 100% spammy term like tweetergetter will probably come up in some tweets by people who say "I hate tweetergetter."

    Have you seen TweetSum? They're still working on the algorithm, but it ranks a user's past behavior against a "douchebag index" and the spammers move to the top. http://www.tweetsum.com
  • Christopher S. Penn · 8 months ago
    You don't -have- to use those terms - those I just illustrated for example. I'd personally go the Google Reader route so that you can use your own judgement to unfollow.
  • nonpretentious · 8 months ago
    This is a great tool for finding spammers who have yet to be suspended by Twitter.

    My question is, why doesn't twitter have a system in place to automatically unfollow any suspended accounts?

    Or, similarly, is there a tool like this to go through all of your followers and figure out if any of them have been suspended so that you can unfollow them to make room for new followers (if you've reached a twitter limit)?

    love the blog! thanks!!

    www.twitter.com/nonpretentious
  • haroldcabezas · 8 months ago
    I never use Yahoo Pipes, this gives me a great excuse. Thanks Chris-this was a great post.