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Trolls in twitter are the people who try to follow like 3000 people.
They are also the folks who 'track' certain words and then @ with related messages.
There's little spam because you can only send one @ message at a time.
On the reverse, I've received invitations after I mentioned words that were being tracked and if I wasn't interested in participating, I just didn't accept the invitation - not a big deal and I really didn't feel spammed either because I was being invited by someone who at least knew I had some common interest with them.
There's a big difference between twitter & RSS: you can't track conversations between blogs on RSS like you can on Twitter.
Josh
Email used to be like that once, and blog comments. Only a matter of time before someone ruins it for everyone .. then a new industry offering products which filter Twitter will be born ...
It's not annoying (yet), but I fear it will expand very quickly. Both those examples I gave cropped up in my inbox within the last fortnight or so, I think there will be more to come yet.
The built-in "Block this user" functionality comes in very useful. The more Twitter users who make use of it, the less likely it is that the spammers will persist.
However, Twitter support were excellent and checked into the guys account and reacted by removing his 'friending' privileges. That's also one of the reasons that the level of any spamming and trolling has stayed low, the support desk has reacted quickly to complaints.
Rather than contributing to -- collaborating on the creation of -- a shared space, each Twitter/Tumblr user creates a thread and builds their own "there" out of all the available threads. Community through aggregation rather than community through collaboration.
Obviously you can turn this feature off but by default it is on.
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2008/02/25/...
Tremendous value as it forces you to think & communicate succinctly in a time when information glut is at an all time high. If anything comes from Twitter it should be the focus on concise & succinct communications. Everything else is superfluous.
In today's world, with search engines indexing Twitter pages, perhaps we can still find new stuff on Twitter using Google, but Twitter itself hasn't solved this problem.
Frankly, to me, learning about interesting new stuff is what the Internet is about. If I want to avoid dumb information on the net, I read a book.
I wish Twitter had an option to allow me to accept followers who only follow N or less other users. I'd set mine to 100. I'll continue to routinely kick out troll followers manually until that day.
http://changingway.org/2008/03/02/twitter-airli...
This is spam.