Spam is everywhere, in our emails, in our blog comments and worst of all in our sandwiches. Recently a new form of spam has started to emerge on Twitter that could spoil the service and drive people away. It’s what’s best described as a RT SPAM or Retweet Spam.
A simple explanation of a retweet
Simply put, and not to go off the point too much, a retweet or RT is simply an action from a twitter user where they repeat another users Tweet with the initials RT before it. An example of this is shown in the image below where I RT another users tweet.
Typically people RT another users tweets because they give it value and they want to share it with their followers. These RT’s can be something funny or informative but most of the time they contain links, links to other websites. This RT culture has really started to catch on in the blogosphere where bloggers and content writers have started to use this as a powerful tool to drive traffic to their websites. If a tweet with a link in it to their website is picked up and retweeted by a few people, and a few of their followers retweet it, you can before you know it have hundreds of users spreading your link around twitter which could in turn drive major traffic to your website. This jewel however hasn’t passed the spammers eyes!
Twitter RT Spam
A recent example of Twitter spammers in action was when the ever popular social media guide website Mashable posted a tweet to one of their recent posts. I found the post when I spotted a Twitter Trend called ‘Twollars’ at the bottom of the list.
When clicked upon I noticed all the RT’s were referring to a Mashable post on Twollars (which turns out to be like Twitter currency… go figure :s ). Nothing strange here, surely it’s just a great post alot of people want to share? Maybe, but why are all the RT’s from users with identical Avatars and similar usernames? See below…
Ignoring the who’s and the why’s, this in our eyes is an example of Twitter Spam, bogus twitter accounts setup in there drones to clutter Twitter with Spam. These accounts will probably attempt to gain trust with Twitter by retweeting well trusted websites (like Mashable) then when the time is right, launch a retweet attack for one of their websites. This could also be, in this particular case, an SEO company positioning themselves to serve their paying clients to through traffic their way? It’s all just opinion but their is logic.
Twitter vs Digg
The rapid growth Twitters popularity has seen it shoot up the rankings and take a healthy bite of the social media pie. One popular social media website it has overtaken is Digg. As of January this year, Hitwise reported Twitters weekly share of visits overtook that of Diggs.
Now because of Twitters growing audience, Digg has tweaked an important feature on their website to lure over Twitter users.
Digg, and a recent change
Digg has been updated with several new features and modifications. One that has caught my eye is the update to the ‘share’ feature. Before Digg users could share a story with their Digg friends, now however you can’t (at least not like before), instead you can either post to Facebook, post to Twitter or share by email, shown below…
Diggs problems of old
In summary, the current issue with Digg is that it’s controlled by a group of powerusers with a close knit group of friends that, at a drop of a hat, vote up that users story, gets it ranking highly on the website and typically getting it top of the results. These powerusers partly rely on the old share feature to quickly and easily share the article with their Digg friends. Now that this has been removed, could we start to see their dominance fade? If they can’t spam/control Digg then they’re going to look at other channels to do this. Digg are pointing them in Twitter and Facebook direction.
SPAM SPAM SPAM
My point here is simple, could a simple little change to Digg generate more spam on Twitter and Facebook. If Digg powerusers spammed Twitter like we’ve illustrated above would Digg become an asset to bloggers again? Is Digg’s intention to push their dominant users in Twitter and Facebooks direction?
It’s seems to us like there is a lot of thought and strategy that’s been put behind such a seemingly little tweak to a feature. Our concern is that by making Digg a place viable for bloggers to go again, Twitter and Facebook could be easy targets for spammers and these so called powerusers.
June 10th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Dude – there is *nothing* wrong with Spam in sandwiches. I just thought you should know.
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