The Bad Side of Twitter
Twitter is all the craze with people nowadays. I was watching the news just the other day when I had to put my glasses on to see what it was that was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It turned out that the news people had actually incorporated some sort of Twitter scroll that was constantly showing you the updates of other people’s tweets online! Unbelievable. No doubt, there are plenty of positives about using a microblogging service such as Twitter. However, there are also plenty of negatives associated with it.
In the beginning, no one even knew what Twitter was. It certainly didn’t have the popularity back then that it does now. However, over time, Twitter caught on and then suddenly blew up over night. Things seemed to be going along fine until the spammers caught wind of it. Just a few weeks ago, I was receiving notifications from Twitter that people were following me. Being the person that I am, I always make it a point to physically check each person’s profile before I even consider adding them. The sorts of things that I will look at are the volume of the tweets that they are putting out there as well as the quality of the tweets. For example, if I examine some of their tweets and see that it is nothing but marketing, then I won’t add them. For me, someone who wants me to follow them back on Twitter has to be adding value to the conversations that I am interested in, or they have to provide information for things that I am interested in. So, I checked through some of the profiles of these people and realized that more than half of them were spammers. But how did I know that they were spammers?
Spammers on Twitter are typically characterized by a few main things. First of all, you’ll notice almost immediately that they are following way more people than are following them back. For example, you will have someone who is following 2,000 people. However, in the meantime, there are only 10 people following them back. Another thing is that they will not have a profile picture or will have a profile picture that is obviously fake. Finally, you’ll notice that their tweets either don’t make sense, are purely marketing/advertising oriented, or they will have only a couple of tweets.
It is unfortunate that there are people out there who would love nothing more than to see Twitter turn into spam central, and for a few days, I considered whether or not I should just get rid of my Twitter account all together. However, after speaking to a few of my “Twitter friends,” I decided not to let the spammers get the best of me. Other than the occasional spammer, Twitter, is for the most part, a reliable service. Because of its growing popularity though, you will sometimes get messages when you log in that Twitter is “over capacity” which simply means that too many people are trying to use it at once. While this is seen as another sort of downside, I am sure that over time, Twitter will get a hold of this and improve it so that people can use it without problems.