The Internet is a wondrous place where we can connect with people from all over the world as easy as our neighbour next door, or some would say more easily.  Tools like email, instant messaging, blogs, podcasts and social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and the subject of this post: Twitter.

Twitter’s ability to instantly broadcast a message to dozens or hundreds of your closest friends makes it an ideal tool for sharing information with those who are interested in what you have to say.  In recent months it has also become the domain of Internet marketers searching for another channel to hock their wares.  Some do it simply, organically by browsing Twitter for people who may be interested in their product or service. This method I don’t have a problem with.  There are others who would use automated services or bots to handle this process and this is where it starts to bother me.  Enter Tweet Tornado.

The Software is the Problem

This is the kind of product that may not be illegal, but certainly goes against the spirit of the Terms of Service of sites like Twitter.  In fact it enables people to explicitly break terms 4, 7 & 8 of Twitter’s ToS. Tweet Tornado’s creator(s) have created software which allows people to create an unlimited number of tweet-spam accounts that can be used to spam innocent Twitterers with that company’s product or service.

On Tweet Tornado’s site the how-to video speaks to some of the less-than-savoury spammer practices such as:

• Creating accounts using fake email addresses
• Using pictures of “hot chicks” to garner more followers
• Using a screen-scraping technology to auto-follow pretty much anyone contributing to the public timeline

With the stability problems that Twitter is already having the practices that this software promotes and enables need to be shut down or at the very least severely curtailed.

Lets just consider this scenario: 50 people were to purchase this software and each register 1000 accounts (completely feasible considering the methods employed) Each of those accounts were to aut0-follow 20,000 people and get a 10% follow-back rate.  Each of those spammers sent out 10 messages per day through each of their accounts Twitter would need to relay a staggering 1 BILLION tweet-spam messages.

50 x 1,000 x (20,000 / 10) x 10 = 1,000,000,000

So let’s stop the bullshit before it starts.  Twitter needs to take proactive measures to explicitly forbid this type of practice, and if necessary put in place the necessary legal safeguards to protect their servers and their systems from the DoS attacks and QoS degredations we’re likely to see.

Protect Our Tweets!

For more information on the issue, see the post at regravity.com; let @ev and @biz know that software like this concerns you too!