Christopher S. Penn's Awaken Your Superhero - Latest Comments in Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

cabezas — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:57:27 -0000

I never use Yahoo Pipes, this gives me a great excuse. Thanks Chris-this was a great post.

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Christopher S. Penn — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:17:22 -0000

That's trickier - check out the API wiki - linked at the bottom of every Twitter page.

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Christopher S. Penn — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:16:58 -0000

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.

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

nonpretentious — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:17:39 -0000

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

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

MarinaMartin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:07:05 -0000

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

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Ari Herzog — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:39:46 -0000

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? :)

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

BobGoyetche — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:12:12 -0000

a great tip with all the detail needed to make it work - thanks for sharing this!

Re: Identifying and nuking Twitter spammers

Guest — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:05:04 -0000

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!