Comments on: Spammers on Twitter = Spwitter?

By: chrispy

chrispy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:01:33 +0000

@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?

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

By: Natalie Jost

Natalie Jost — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:09:09 +0000

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? :)

By: Dan York

Dan York — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:03:31 +0000

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.

By: Standards for Life by Natalie Jost » The GodSplogger

Standards for Life by Natalie Jost » The GodSplogger — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:46:22 +0000

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

By: Chris Harrison

Chris Harrison — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:19:27 +0000

(After all, who needs vowels anyway?)

By: Chris Harrison

Chris Harrison — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:19:07 +0000

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”.

By: Michael Montgomery

Michael Montgomery — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:05:12 +0000

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?