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Spammers on Twitter = Spwitter?

Found an article at Silicon Alley Insider talking about spam on twitter. Apparently, it’s happening quite a bit.

Coincidentally, I received several pieces of the stuff in my email this morning which made me think of “spit.” Spam + Twitter = spit

As in,

“@spitter hey, it was really nice that you _spit_ in my email bin today… by the way, why are you following 10K people, but none of them follow you back.”


Someone in the discussion at SAI added to it calling it “spwit.” I kinda like that.

Your thoughts?

Links:
Has Twitter Finally Gone Mainstream? Or Are We Getting Spammed?
Mashable: Twitter Spam Out of Control

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7 comments

By Chris – April 14, 2008

  • http://montgomerystudios.com Michael Montgomery

    There seems to be a lot of them, for about a month now.

    Perhaps Spittr?

    I’m also inclined to object to the data scrapers, following thousands with but a few followers. Why not just read the public feed of everyone?

  • http://cdharrison.com Chris Harrison

    I’ve received quite a bit of “spit” myself as of late. If people that add me have a high following:followed ratio I block them. Most of the time those folks are spammers and/or bots… and serve little to no interest to me.

    Along the same vein as ‘bacn’ though, I think a geekier name for twitter spam ought to be “spt”.

  • http://cdharrison.com Chris Harrison

    (After all, who needs vowels anyway?)

  • http://www.standardsforlife.com/the-godsplogger/ Standards for Life by Natalie Jost » The GodSplogger

    [...] Pallé is talking about Twitter spammers today too. I call them spitters, and when they spam, they spit on us. :)   Categories: [...]

  • http://twitter.com/danyork Dan York

    I agree that: a) there’s a lot of spam coming into Twitter; and b) we need a term for it.

    I would, though, suggest that “SPIT” is not the right term as that is already heavily used in Voice-over-IP circles to mean “SPam for Internet Telephony” and there are many references to it (including white papers, presentations, and webinars). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoIP_spam and http://voipsa.org/blog/category/spit/ for some pointers to the usage.

    I don’t have an alternative suggestion, although “spwit” was rather cute.

  • http://personatalie.us Natalie Jost

    You’re going to make me go to an actual website today, aren’t you? :)

    Here are my thoughts.

    1. spam is a waste of time, technology, electricity, and it’s totally unethical as far as I’m concerned. The motive behind it is always self-serving and usually devious.

    2. spam doesn’t deserve a nickname, but if I have to choose a word to describe it quickly so people know… I’d say spit. Spwit is not only difficult to say, it sounds almost cute, which spam is not.

    good enough? :)

  • chrispy

    @montgomery, good point. I’m having a hard time grasping whatever it is they’re after. The public would make a lot more sense…

    @cd Yh! wh nds vwls nwy?! ;-)

    @Dan Hrm, Thanks for pointing that out.

    @natalie Yes.. I am making you get out of your reader and twhirl… just this one time though. So, thank you for gracing us with your input. :-P

    Spam is a waste of time. I believe it’s an assault on our attention and productivity. Think about it: the millions and millions of pieces that get processed by human eyes,even for just a second each adds up to a lot of wasted time. Of course, if you’re signing up for twitter your setting yourself up for huge distraction anyway. So… moot? :-)

    Anyway, I think putting a name on it is important. I’m a bit of a technical communicator and having vernaculars that are easy to remember is important. I like the nastiness that “spit” connotes, but to Dan’s point, it’s taken… I found this today after someone sent me a message for the misspelling of this word:

    twaddle |?twädl| informal
    noun
    trivial or foolish speech or writing; nonsense : he dismissed the novel as self-indulgent twaddle. See note at nonsense .

    verb [ intrans. ] archaic
    talk or write in a trivial or foolish way : what is that old fellow twaddling about?

    DERIVATIVES
    twaddler |?twädl?r; ?twädl-?r| |?twødl?r| |?twødl?r| noun
    ORIGIN late 18th cent.: alteration of earlier twattle, of unknown origin.

    I’m serious. I can’t make this stuff up. I got that from my Mac’s dictionary.

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