Dave and I had a great time putting this show together, and I had the opportunity to produce an episode of the AGP for the first time in well over a year. It felt good to get my hands dirty again, and I think Dave appreciated the break.

• Visit the AGP Blog
• Download the show [mp3, 76 mins]
• Subscribe to the show [rss]
• Write a review in iTunes
• Follow the show on Twitter

There’s no question that we each only have so many hours in a week to do our online business. I’ve got a pretty rich net-life too with the blog, the AGP, Twitter, MSN, gTalk, the myriad blogs that I read and the endless stream of podcasts I have pouring into my iPod touch every morning. So since April was my busiest month of Twittering EVER (by 72%) it would stand to reason that it was a dismal month for the blog.

But I’ve really missed blogging. May is going to be a bit of a catch up month, I’ve got the last four posts from the BlackBerry Flip series, as well as my I’ve-been-writing-it-forever post “Mac vs. PC” (sans @hodgman). I am also hard at work on content for the new podcast. I’ve got the first few episodes in various states of pre-production, and I’m hoping to release the first show on Canada Day.

All this means that I’m going to be much less visible on Twitter for the next while until I’m able to achieve some sort of balance. I’ve met lots of cool and interesting folks on Twitter the past few months, and met some of them in person at the NHL Tweetups that were held during the Canucks playoff run this year. I’m not abandoning Twitter, just bringing things back to reality a bit.

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!

Twitter has snapped up the IP behind a couple of popular Web 2.0 services.  I Want Sandy and Stikkit were both acquired by Twitter a few weeks ago.  The services were originally scheduled to go offline last week, but this window has been extended until the end of business (17:00 PT) this Friday, December 19th.

Check out the original post over on the AGP blog.

Time will tell…