Spam Management in Twitter Needed

After just a week’s expe­ri­ence with Twit­ter, I can see a real need for a spam fil­ter­ing mech­a­nism (like Akismet for Word­Press). The ratio of spam to good tweets is already bad, and get­ting worse every­day — and that’s after just a brief expe­ri­ence with the ser­vice.

If not addressed soon, this could be the Achilles’ heel for main­stream adop­tion of Twit­ter as a highly val­ued com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form.

In the mean­time most of my friends don’t use Twit­ter today, so it has min­i­mal value to me on a per­sonal basis… It’s like the early fax machine mar­ket: you can have the best fax machine in the world, but if the peo­ple and com­pa­nies you most want to reach don’t yet have fax machines them­selves, you can’t com­mu­ni­cate.

Net­work effects, in other words, as applied to each per­son’s own net­work. You need a crit­i­cal mass within your own net­work to real­ize the ben­e­fits.