TwitBlock is born
A bulk blocking and spam filter tool for Twitter
I’ve finally got round to building the Twitter app I’ve been thinking about for months. While everyone else is preoccupied with making fun, or cool apps, I’ve been thinking about the increasing problem of spam and junk followers on Twitter. I won’t go into why I think this is such a problem right now, plenty of time for that later.
This is just a quick announcement to say that I’ve released an early alpha version of a tool that I hope to develop into something genuinely useful. Currently it’s a simple scanner that analyses your followers for signs of “spammy” behaviour. I’ll post more details about these indicators soon, and I’ll also share some of the interesting discoveries I’ve been making about Twitter spam as I go on my mission.
UPDATE: I have posted about these indicators
Data mining for good, not evil
One of the principal aims of TwitBlock is to gather data in order to improve the service – i.e. to make it accurate enough that it could [in theory] be used to automatically filter spam out like an email junk filter endeavours.
By logging into TwitBlock (via Twitter OAuth of course) you are sharing the list of people that you block. As long as the app is authorized I can update this list and the app can learn from it.
Additionally I will be writing various bots (crawlers) that analyse Twitter activity in terms of suspicious behaviour and mine more data. More about these bots later too :)
I would be very interested in finding a way to implement your spam-sniffing technology in my Twitter client at some point.
Very early days, it needs a lot of development, and a lot of data.
I’m glad you’re interested though Duane, cheers!
Looks promising! Can’t wait to see it hit 1.0 ;)
Pretty neat- It is much faster to go through and block spammers this way. Thanks!
Nice service. But, for the most part I don’t care if a bot/spammer is following me (unless there’s a good reason to). What I want to know if I’m following a bot/spammer. Will you add the ability to scan who I’m following?
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s a good idea, because some people are fooled into following spammers who are posing as legitimate accounts.
Lots of people say they don’t care if they’re followed by spammers. It’s about the bigger picture really. It’s about whether you want this junk to have a presence in your community.
Yeah, I agree, getting rid of spammers on either side is good, and I’ll use your tool to do that. But, mainly I don’t want to follow spammers because they fill your feed with crap.
Where did it go? I was looking around for it, and suddenly it looks like ghost busters!LOL! It doesn’t work, and won’t let me log on either. I suppose you are still working on it? I would love to see my most recent followers floating right on top, so I can address them immediately. Looking around for them on the spamminess list, or having to go into their page and having to read their stuff…ughhh..that’s what I want to avoid in the first place!.. just want to do an initial appraisal, usually, that will give me a good screening machanism before I bother..if it’s “obvious” what they are.., I can knock them off immediately!
Twitter suffered a DOS attack today and there are still problems with the API.