Tweetbots

Tweetbots is a service that automatically re-sends people’s tweets automatically (re-tweets). The tagline reads “stalk, track, auto-follow, re-tweet, feed-tweet.” Whoa! Sounds spammy!

Twitspam

Twitspam is a site dedicated to blocking social networking spammers who think that they can inundate us with their spammy messages. You can help them by sending a tweet that has the name of the spammy Twitter account and include the hashtag “#twitspam” or “#twitterspam” in the same tweet. They will find it if your Twitter account is public.

(Nice WordPress theme, Twitspam!)

Twitter Spam Crackdown Hurting Companies

Comcast, Jet Blue and Pandora have all confirmed that as of yesterday they were unable to follow folks who have followed them, according to ZDNet. This is all thanks to Twitter’s (perhaps too-harsh?) anti-spam efforts which are meant to crack down on unwanted follows from bots.

Twitter Blacklist Closed

Update: The Twitter Blacklist has been closed down. The final message on the site read:

As of July 12th 2008, this service will no longer be available.

Dear friends, fans, and foes,

Of late I’ve lost confidence in Twitter as a platform. Their uptime is risible; their community interaction questionable. (Think failure to enforce their own TOS - “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users”? Forget it.) I don’t think Twitter’s going to get any better; in fact, I think it’s all downhill from here on out.

Luckily there’s now an alternative. Check out Identi.ca. It’s open source and open data. If spam becomes an issue - and let’s face it, it will - the community will be the ones who work out how to deal with it, and it’ll happen - fast. That’s a guarantee we don’t have with Twitter.

I’m confident that Identi.ca, and Laconica, the software that powers it, are the right route to take into the future. (Full disclosure: confident enough, in fact, to have accepted a job working on the project.) For that reason, I won’t be running the Twitter Blacklist any more, and will be shutting down the API.

Thanks very much for all the support and interest you’ve shown for the duration of this experiment, and I hope that you’ll consider moving on from Twitter to a sustainable alternative.

— Earle

Tweet2Win

Tweet2Win is a service that lets you win prizes by posting links that serve as advertisements about the web site, Tweet2Win to Twitter. As you post, you’re automatically entered in a “raffle” to win a $150 gift certificate from either Amazon, eBay, Victoria’s Secret, iTunes, or Overstock.com. Way to spam Twitter.

StopTwitterSpam

Mashable blogged about the blog at StopTwitterSpam.com. At the blog, they are manually identifying spammers, tracking media coverage, and listing proposed solutions for the Twitter Spam problem. StopTwitterSpam is here on Twitter. 

TwitterSnooze

Is a verbose Twitterer getting on your nerves? Or maybe everyone is tweeting about a conference you didn’t attend? Instead of un-following the users, you can just snooze them instead. With Twittersnooze, you simply enter in your Twitter credentials, the username of who you want to snooze, and the length of time for the snooze, which is in the range of one day to 30 days.

The Twitter Blacklist

The Twitter Blacklist is a site dedicated to identifying Twitter spammers, something they do based on a following to follower ratio. Think that new follower might be a spammer? You can check this site to be sure. Even better, a Greasemonkey script is available from Michael Klier which will put a banner at the top of a Twitter user profile if that username is identified as a spammer.

Update: This service is now closed.