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?

Here’s another example of Apple’s iPhone AppStore model failure – the TwitterFon example.

TwitterFon is a (great) Twitter client for the iPhone. All Twitter clients rely on Twitter’s public API. Twitter is one of the stars of the Internet social medias / social networking applications. Like most Internet application startups, they have an agile development model which involves doing lots of incremental modifications/enhancements on their platform with frequent release cycles. Also like most Internet applications/platforms, they offer a public API for 3rd party applications to connect to their platform. Note that In the case of Twitter, the bulk of their traffic comes from their API and not from twitter.com. More generally, this model is the new model for Internet applications and platforms development.

This is where iPhone app developers have a problem: they develop native iPhone apps that connect to these Internet applications through their API but can’t keep up with these because of the slow AppStore approval process.

Case in point: TwitterFon. This morning when I tried to launch TwitterFon, it crashed on startup. Tried again, no go. Tweetted about it from my laptop and received a reply of similar problems from a friend. A few minutes later, the @twitterfon Twitter user started following me so I went to check it’s user profile and tweet stream to see that it was discussing the issues and also gave a link to it’s blog, here’s a quote:

The root cause is that twitter respond JSON contents which contain unexpected values.
[...]
I have already submitted a new version which implemented a workaround to address the issue, but it will take a few days to get an approval from AppStore. Also, I reported the issue to Twitter. I hope they fix the issue soon. Otherwise, you have to wait until Apple approves the new version of TwitterFon.

Now, can you see the problem? On one side you have agile Internet application developers which move fast, release often. On the other side you have Apple’s slow, bureaucratic AppStore approval process. In the middle you have the iPhone who want to be the best mobile Internet device.

If you want to be the best mobile Internet device you have to be able to cope efficiently with the Internet speed development style, period. In the TwitterFon example, we don’t really care if Twitter introduced a bug or not in their API that killed TwitterFon: by today’s standards, everyone must be able to move fast and in our example the only one that can’t move fast is Apple with its boggus AppStore model. Fail!

Wow. I haven’t updated my blog in the last 6+ months, what a shame. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say – I know it’s cliché but – I have been too busy. I joined Praized Media, a web startup developing a local search platform for social medias, as Lead Engineer last October (2007). Let’s say that since then, Praized has been like a dark hole for me – but a very exiting and fun one tough! Ruby, Rails, Cloud Computing – some of my day-to-day work buzzwords! See it for yourself on our hub on praized.com or embedded into a blog on beta-tribe.com or on facebook.

In the past 6 months I have mainly been micro-blogging or lifestreaming on twitter. I am also still doing lots of social bookmarking using del.icio.us and Google Reader.

Here are some of the places where you can find me:

• twitter
• delicious
• Google Reader shared items
• friendfeed
• Facebook

I will install widgets for these services on my blog shortly.