The spam problem on Twitter, which to be honest has always been there, for me anyhow, appears to be getting worse.
Like most people I get spam followers all the time, they follow you in the hope that you will follow them back and they can then flood your stream with their spammy tweets. Most people I know are quite wise to them and as a result either ignore them as I do, or report them to Twitter, which usually results in them getting banned and their accounts suspended.
What I however am noticing a lot more of, are the automated reply bots that start their Tweets with @jamesclay, so it appears in my @Mentions stream. They are usually the result of me talking about something or other, usually the iPad, or the Kindle. I use to get about two or three a week, which wasn’t too much of an issue. However I am now getting three or four a day!
I have written before about the “end” of Twitter, but even I have been surprised by the fact that a) Twitter is still around and b) we still use it.
However if the spam situation gets worse than that may start to put me off using Twitter and I can’t be alone thinking like that, so many people would stop using it regularly, maybe try a different service. The problem with people leaving Twitter is that, that is the main reason people are on Twitter. It’s the people, the conversation and the sharing that makes Twitter work. Without the people and the people using Twitter, then it just won’t work; there will be no conversation.
So am I alone in getting all this @ spam replies, or is it annoying you too?