It hasn’t really been that long since I started Twittering, when you think about it. It’s been helpful, giving me the ability to post small snippets and read such snippets from other users (such as Major Nelson, or the BBC tech show Click) at my leisure. But recently, the amount of people deciding to "follow" me has got me thinking about whether Twitter really is used for what it was designed.

Today’s web trolling has shown me that Twitter is being used no only for ingenious purposes, but it is also being used maliciously…

Today I read Donncha’s post about "How to win an Apple Mac Air" (which STILL lacks an RSS feed timestamp…) One of his friends has started an account on Twitter where once it reaches 5000 followers, one of them will win a MacBook Air. Sounds interesting – whatever it is… According to his post regarding "What is wubud?", it’s "to demonstrate how the power of conversation with communities of people is the way forward."
But, the real definition is yet to come. Apparently it will be up on Twitter at the same time as some newspaper gets the exclusive. My money’s on the Metro

On the flipside, there’s been a lot of speculation going around that Twitter is now becoming a haven for spammers, spam bots and other nasties. Over the past while, I’ve had a lot of – in my eyes – random users following me on Twitter. I’ve gone on to see who/what exactly they are. 4 of them are normal people, 1 of them appears to be an Indianapolis enthusiast, 1 Twitter experiment, 1 user who hasn’t made any tweets, 1 UK-based award, 1 what appears to be an Internet startup business. And, the "nail in the coffin" – 1 spam account which spams links to somewhere I’m not interested in.

It’s the spam account that really worries me. A little bit more web browsing led me to this article by Jeffro2pt0 (the guy who does WordPress Weekly) – Twitter Gets the Bird Flu. There’s a guy who made an account on Twitter to see how many people would automatically follow back a spam bot that decides to follow them. The results are disturbing, showing that a few people do decide to follow people back without paying any attention to who, or better yet what, they really are. If you want to see for yourself, you can find it here. Don’t follow it, because it’s not a real user!

In fact, if you had some sense, and read it’s one "favourite" tweet, you’d see this:

Doing an experiment, how many followers can I get on a page that specifically tags itself as a spambot honeypot?

It sorta reminds me of the honeypot method Donncha uses on his site to prevent bad spiders from accessing his site – which he kindly shared with me. It’s a simple little link that you subtly add into your site, which when visited leads to a PHP script which automatically adds that IP to the .htaccess file, blocking it from future access. The really nice part is that is only catches screen scrapers, which deliberately ignore the robots.txt file. If they had any sense, they wouldn’t be blocked right now…

Looking over my .htaccess now shows me that since I implemented it here, 23 IPs have been blocked. Which is in addition to the 15 individual IPS and 2 subnet masks I’ve manually blocked for suspicious activity reports. I can be paranoid, what’s wrong with that?