Is Twitter Worth It?

Posted by Gabe on November 24, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | Read the First Comment

“Getting weird DMs? Probably due to phishing. Don’t go to the links sent in the DMs or give out your login & PW!”

“We’re still seeing phishing attempts; don’t click on strange links! And tell folks who DM you phishing links to reset their password.”

“Someone saying they’ve got 100s of Google Wave invites to give out & you’ve just got to RT & follow them to get one? It’s a scam!”

“General tip: don’t retweet a spammer’s message. You might get suspended accidentally.”

These are tweets randomly chosen from the @spam account on Twitter. (I highly recommend everyone follow this account by the way.)  If you have been reading my posts you will know that I am a huge Twitter advocate.  I’ve never had a bad word to say, at least until this post.  The spammers, scammers, porn bots, phishing scams and whatever else is lurking out there is a huge problem for Twitter in my estimation.  If these were isolated incidents that would be one thing. But they certainly are not. It is getting so bad now that I recently got an @reply by someone who had a pornographic avatar.  Now c’mon people – I have a nosy 11-year-old who is vists me in my home office all the time.  I also get several of these “phishing” DMs a day.  Maybe if you follow a hundred people or so you get fewer, but I bet you still get them.   About six months ago I clicked on one of these links and it corrupted my Twitter account.  I was locked out and someone else tweeted inanities from my profile. That was called the “Mikey” virus. The fix to get rid of it was complicated.  To discover the fix and to implement it took a few hours right when I needed Twitter the most. AAARGHH!!

How that virus was propagated was by clicking on someone’s profile who was infected.  When people discovered that my account was compromised, they all tweeted it. “Don’t click on @KidsAreHeroes – his account is infected!”  Not the publicity that I was seeking at the time.

So now I am smarter. I don’t click on links I don’t trust. I have even gone so far as to turn the switch on in Tweetdeck that allows you to preview the long URL that the short URL represents before you click on it.  Yes it’s an extra step but worth it.  I “report as spam” the obvious accounts, and unfollow many others - I find myself doing that a few times a day at least.  I am vigilant about approving which Twitter lists I appear on as a result of what happened two weeks ago.  When people send me a reply that is spam, it irks me so much that I block them, then have to restart Tweetdeck so that their spammy request doesn’t show on my screen.

My question then becomes, is all this worth it? Why should we put up with all this aggravation when it seems that Twitter has no ability to improve our experience?  For me, yes, it definitely is. I am still making true connections to people I never would have if it weren’t for Twitter.  But I can no longer blindly say that if you want to promote your business, or whatever, you should use it. I can now see where putting up with this kind of silliness does not warrant having a Twitter account for some.  I have a friend who recently moved to the Washington area. She is an amazing photographer who took pictures pro bono for us on Kids Are Heroes Day. She is not on Twitter.  I have recommended it to her highly and I plan to give her a quick hands-on class about it if she wants it.  But I must include this post when I discuss it with her.  Things like this never used to enter the conversation, but now they must.  Maybe it is because as you follow more people you get exposed to it more.

So, are there any steps we can take to minimize the impact of these miscreants?  My last post discussed the pros and cons of protecting your tweets.  I was also since asked to comment on the True Twit Validation tool.  This is a free service that will attempt to tell you by email if the person following you is human or a bot.  When you follow someone who is “protected” by this service, you get an automatic DM (direct message) that asks you to verify yourself by typing in some words via the Captcha service.  Once you do this they get an email stating that you passed their “human” test.  This service does not stop people from following you, it just acts as a tool to tell you if it thinks who is following you is human or not.  It is still up to you to deal with the follower as you normally would.  I have no strong opinions about this, other than the fact that it seems more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s pretty easy to spot a spammer when you check who is following you. I don’t need an email to sift through and match up with.  And I have heard from folks who think it’s insulting to get one of these DMs, and others who flat out say they will not bother with people who use the service.

I just treat all this nonsense as part of what I have to deal with to get the benefit from using Twitter.  At this point I am not jumping ship, but at the same time paying more attention to our Facebook fan page.  We’ve had a recent spike in new fans thanks to a few people who suggested the page to their friends. (Thanks so much to those of you who did that!)  Things seem much calmer on that platform, at least for now.

So what do you think? Would love to hear from people who follow less than 500 to hear if this is still an issue for them. Also love to hear solutions on how Twitter can fix the problems. I myself have always wondered why they don’t make the sign-up process a little more sophisticated so as to weed some of the spammers out from the get go.