Yesterday's post about twitter as a source of breaking news got me thinking about misuses of twitter. After all, two uses of all communication media are advertising and porn. Both are almost guaranteed to be part of the present and/or future twitter.

Wading Into the Stream

I already have a self-proclaimed pornstar as one of my followers on twitter. Now, I only have a hundred or so followers, and there are hundreds of thousands to millions of twitter accounts. If things extrapolate, there's already a lot of porn on twitter. Either that or pornstars have a passion for astrophysics. Probably the former.

As for advertising, the most obvious form would be tweet spam. OK, well, the most obvious will be the advertising that the owners of twitter will probably place on every page. Now that they've got this huge network effect, they will want to monetize it with advertising. Small ads on twitter.com pages would not bother me, though it will slow down what already seems to be a relatively slow website.

Of course, most people I know are not reading tweets through the twitter website, but through clients. One only sees the tweets, so ads have to be inserted into the tweet stream to be seen by the majority of users. Tweet spam seems inevitable.

Populist Attack

No one is going to voluntarily follow a spammer. Spam would have to weasel its way in to get attention. The obvious method would be to create advertising tweets and to add in keywords for the current trending topics. A search for the trending topics, which twitter provides as a single click, would include the spam.

The tweet stream on trending topics flows rapidly, so a spammer would want to send many, many tweets to keep them in view in a time ordered search. That means spam tweets every few seconds to get noticed. The change in trending topics seems to change on order of tens of minutes, so that is not much concern.

Community Response

The obvious response is blocking users who spam. However, most users won't bother blocking the large number of spammers that could crop up. The spammers could still reach a lot of users, and numbers of eyeballs is what spam is all about.

The folks who provide tweet readers would have to respond by adding spam blockers to their clients. Such blacklists would be come common and hopefully shared. The challenge then is whether spammers could modify or create new accounts fast enough to work around blacklistings.

Finally, one might expect that somewhere in the current or future twitter terms of service there will be some prohibition against excessive promotional messaging. That flies in the face of an open messaging system. We all use twitter for some sort of advertising. I follow woot.com and amazon mp3 tweets. These are advertising tweets that I want to read. How does someone differentiate between "good" ads and spam?

Unfriendly User Mode?

When starting up a new supercomputer, the admins would have a period of "friendly user mode". I was lucky enough to be able to use that time period once to dominate a new supercomputer for several weeks. The result was a simulation of galaxy formation that appeared in the Imax film "Cosmic Voyage".

Twitter is an emerging communications medium. It seems to be in friendly user mode, but that can't last forever. The large network of people on twitter now looks like a market to be tapped with advertising. If you build it, they will come.