Social Media | kdmurray.blog

Over the past year or so I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting up a podcast of my own to go along with the efforts that I’ve put in with Dave and Cait on the Aussie Geek Podcast. I love doing the AGP and it helps to stimulate a large portion of the geek side of my personality… but not all of it. The one piece that it leaves off is the developer piece.

I’ve tried to stimulate this in a few different ways in the past, writing blog posts around pieces of code; trying to kick off a standalone open-source project and writing my two plugins for WordPress (Admin Links Widget, Random Image Selector). Though these were all items that I enjoyed they lacked a certain interactivity.

When Jeff offered to let me co-host WordPress Weekly to provide a developer’s perspective it gave me the unique opportunity of mixing my interest in software development with an interaction with a community. I only did a handful of shows at the end of last year, but it helped to reinforce that I really enjoyed putting my skills to use providing information for other people.

There are a great number of development-focused podcasts which discuss wider abstract concepts, and complex topics but precious few which dive into the nuts and bolts of specific software development topics. Examples of a couple that I’ve really enjoyed listening to lately are the .NET Rocks! podcast (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) and the Stack Overflow podcast (Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky).

Realistically, this new show idea won’t come to pass until later this year, probably in the April-May timeframe as I have several weeks of school to get through before I explain to my lovely wife why I’m spending yet more time in front of the computer.

So there it is, out in the open: I hope to be releasing a development-focused show sometime later this year.

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!