SweetVision Javascript and other web programming topics

Twitter Name change, the name should reflect the spam

Hey I know, this post has nothing to do with the trend you were looking at when you clicked the link to get here. I tweeted there just to make a point, trends are broken and full of spam!

So I have been working on some bits of code to analyze the twitter trending topics. I figure it would be a great way to be aware of what is going on in the general social consciousness. So I developed some code to pull the current trends and also list the recent tweets for those trends to give them context. Over the last few weeks I have been monitoring my prototype and making tweaks here and there. One cool thing about it is that I am much more aware of what is going on in the world, at least the world according to twitter. This morning I was looking at the tweets for the Spain trend and over half the tweets were spam. The more of them I read the more I was getting turned off of twitter. Currently I don’t think twitter has any spam fighting systems in place at all, it sure does not seem to any way. It got me to thinking about how the spammers are actually altering the trends and that as they spam a trend it makes the trend artificially strong. So not only are the spammers junking up the stream they are also diverting it as well.

With FaceBook about to release public feeds; I think Twitter had better start working fast and furious on fixing the spam issue. FaceBook’s greater verification of people, and strong desire to take Twitter’s traffic could make Twitter’s traffic surge just a blip on the internet stat counters. Frankly I am torn between wanting FaceBook to be the main public stream and Twitter. FaceBook allows longer updates and integrates video and link sharing, but Twitter gives me all of the fresh stats, feels more mashupable, and is over all much simpler.

Any one have any suggestions on what we should rename twitter so that it reflects its new spammie nature? Spitter? Spameme?