Blog Oklahoma / Blog

I'm Free! The spam demons has been exorcised. I can now see Oklahoma in the Twitter feed again.

I'm finally done cleaning up @blogoklahoma's following list over at Twitter. I can't stress how much I regret using an auto follow service. All it did was clutter up the Twitter stream with bots and spammers. It made it near impossible to follow or even carry on a conversation. If you don't understand how much the clutter hurts, watch one of the Bing ads. It's just like that.

It didn't take too long to clean out who @blogoklahoma was following, just a mere 3 hours over the course of two days. Twitter's redesign of their follow pages both helped and hindered at the same time. The improvements they made were much needed and worked well, but there were still quite a few much needed features missing. A following count like you get in the follow notifications would have simplified things. A page count would be great (Take number of followers divide by 20 you'll get the number of pages). And finally sorting.

So how can you determine a Twitter spammer?

Now what I'm calling a Twitter spammer might not match what you would call one. To me a Twitter spammer is someone who mass follows, likely using a bot service, and matches other certain criteria. This does not mean anyone I personally followed, even if they matched the below criteria. I was interest in what ever they were tweeting.

First off their handle should be a dead give away (GetCashNow). How many people are they following? Is there is more than one digit in front of the comma? Did they at anytime tweet: "Get more followers by...", "Earn money by...", or "Meet singles..."? Do they only have one or less tweets? How can you follow 2,0000 people and only post one tweet?

For the most part I only unfollowed the bots and spammers, but I also went ahead unfollowed abandoned twitters (seen a few, "I just don't get Twitter comments").

So let the conversation begin again. Please feel free to @ or DM Blog Oklahoma.