Only yesterday we were talking about how creative people embrace new technology and use them to stimulate us with positive ideas (although some might not approve of the results) … well, there’s two other groups of people who also exploit technology, beyond the ‘normal’ user. They are pornographers and spammers – both driven by money.
Some of you Twitter-users might have noticed accounts with strange Twitter names ‘following’ you.
Yesterday, our sister Isle of Wight News site, VentnorBlog received a notification that Twitter user, UL2UMY6SSH, was following us.
It was apparent that this might not be a normal Twitter name, but it’s natural that if someone wants to follow you, you look at who they are.
Clicking the link we found a single twitter posting that was a plain and simple advert
Wouldn’t you like to lounge in your pajamas and earn a paycheck? http://spam-should-die.all
Which actually is pretty well focused advertising, given much Twitter browsing _is_ probably done in pyjamas.
We noticed that UL2UMY6SSH had also bothered another 192 people at that point too. When we checked it this morning, that number had risen to 258 – and amazingly they had gained a 2 followers.
We also saw that the account had been suspended. Clearly there had been complaints about dear old UL2UMY6SSH.
We see that the help page that Twitter has put up explaining how an account qualifies to be a suspended account was created in August, this leads up to believe that it’s a pretty recent phenomenon.
While Twitter doesn’t have a ‘report this account’ option (yet?), it looks like that if many people choose to Block updates from a particular account, it is marked for suspension.
Every new popular service has to deal with the Spam and the pain it causes the service and the users of the service. Looks like Twitter are just entering that phase now.