talkingDigital

Podcast: Play in new window

This is it! This is the very first actual episode of the talkingDigital podcast.

Yes, we did do another episode, but that was an episode 000 – essentially, it was just a pilot. This episode actually features content and even a little information.

In this episode we discuss:

Twitter spam followers – Folks who follow you on twitter, but they never do anything but send out spam such as marketing info, pitch diet plans or tweet about how you can get more followers with their program.

Windows 7 house party silliness – It is a mystery to everyone whether Microsoft knows how cheesy/campy/horrible their Windows 7 party videos and downloads are. But is the strategy working?

Smart phone update – Palm Pre received a major software update this week, Motorola recently announced two new Android phones (Cliq will release Oct 19 and another phone that is yet to be named or shown) and iPhone is as strong as ever.

Forum moderator rant – Some moderators take their position too seriously and prevent dialog (the purpose of a forum) from happening.

Picasa 3.5 – Face recognition, powerful tools and ease of use. So long iPhoto.

We are sure that someone has written about this new approach spammers are using on Twitter, but we haven’t seen anything about it.

Twitter spam needs a name so we are going to call it spatter (get it spam+Twitter – not that clever, but at least it’s something).

Twitter filters out spammers by measuring blocked users and also users who post a lot but have few followers. To get around this, spammers are setting up new accounts and posting content that is not spam.

The first hundred or so messages are about food, movies, humorous comments, etc. We assume that they are using content from other Twitterers to create these posts.

Once they have a few posts established, they start following people. Especially those who automatically follow back. Many users do a quick check to see if the user is posting real content or just spatter. Typically users don’t read many of the posts, they check to make sure that all of the posts aren’t made up of sales pitches.

Once the spammer has build up enough of a following, then they unleash their spatter. Typically stuff about how to work from home, porn, or other typical spam material.

To some, a follower is a follower, but eventually this could cause a problem for Twitter as bad guys setup automated systems to let spatter loose throughout the network. This could be one reason that Twitter objects so much to programs that automatically return follows. The more followers a spammer has, the more difficult it will be to distinguish them from legitimate Twitter users.