Update : Here’s another great post about spam on twitter.

Twitter has been around a little while now, perhaps it is even becoming mature, and certain patterns of usage are beginning to make themselves clear. Retweeting, the practice of forwarding on an interesting tweet to one’s followers, has become standard and will soon be added by Twitter on their main site.

Another phenomenon that has entrenched itself is spam messages.  This isn’t surprising, every new communication medium quickly develops its own sort of junk mail.  Luckily in the electronic world it is easier to take action against junk marketers than in the real world.  Email spam filters have advanced tremendously, if you use a webmail service you should very rarely see spam in your inbox anymore.  Twitter, unfortunately, is still in its golden age of spam with no filters instituted by the twitter servers and few third party services that help.  So far I have noticed a few types of spam on twitter and for all of them there is a solution that each and every one of us can help with until Twitter gets its act together and institutes some system to deal with it. (more…)