Twitter’s trending topics is a spammers dream
Twitter’s API is a double edge sword. On one hand, it’s enabled hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter apps to spring up and has provided a mechanism to morph the platform into some really neat and useful tools. On the other hand, the simple and open API allows programmers to easily build and manage spam bots. The place is littered with them.
To their credit, Twitter is has been pretty aggressive in their fight against spam. This is not only good for Twitter, but given the full court press from Facebook, it’s a MUST DO.
This brings me to the Trending Topics feature of Twitter. A mechanism that allows anyone to inject their message into a filtered, yet public, feed based on a keyword with the link to that feed being displayed prominently on a user’s homepage and the Twitter homepage. That is a spammers dream come true, served up nicely with a side of brown butter sauce by Twitter (who some say is drowning in spam).
Check out this snapshot of a trending topic today, “AT&T”:
Everything outlined in red is spam.
I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous. Over 50% of the posts are spam. I’m asking myself, “What’s the value here? And how is this useful?“ Given Twitter’s fight against and problem with spam, why would they keep this feature around?
My advice to Twitter: Remove trending topics altogether. It’s quickly becoming an unused feature, that is, if you’re an actual human.
Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 23, 2009