eventually consistent

I think Twitter is about to have a really bad spam problem and I am not talking about spam from the people you are following. This spam is manageable since you can always unfollow anyone.

No, real time Twitter search and tinyurls are a winning combination to flood the stream with spam.

I believe that the real time search phenomenon is one of the hottest concept in social medias now. Thanks to clients like TweetDeck, you can hook yourself to a search stream using keywords or hashtags and get a real time feed of everything happening in Twitter about these keywords. For example, when I saw the information about the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, I immediately started a real time search on “mysql” to get the beat on the implications of this acquisition on MySQL. Sure enough, in one tweet I found interesting, I clicked on the tinyurl and got to a spammer site. Ouch. That was too easy.

Any spammer can now leverage any hot trends in Twitter by sending tweets about this trend and include their spam url hidden behind a tinyurl. If the tweet is well worded, you can’t even rely on the url to get an idea of its validity.

I think this is just a matter of time before real time searches are flooded with spam.

What are the solutions?

First, tinyurl services should probably start checking for potential spammers urls and not transform them.

Second, at some point I think Twitter wont have the choice to run spam detection on inbound messages. Since the inbound messages throughput is quite large and increasing as Twitter is gaining popularity, it might be too costly to run spam detection on all messages. To avoid checking all messages maybe they could establish some sort of trustiness or karma indicator on users. Depending on the users behaviors or maybe by looking at their social graphs, Twitter could rate users and use that to decide to apply spam detection or not on inbound messages form these users.

What do you think?