Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Feature Requests For All Twitter Clients: Automatically Block & Report Obvious Spammers

Twitter itself seems unable or unwilling to stop obvious spammers.

Everyone using Twitter has seen this, mention a hot product like the iPad or iPhone, and BOOM your timeline fills up with spam from bots that have zero followers and follow zero accounts.

Tonight it hit me, why not have the Twitter client filter out and automatically report spammers? Even if Twitter eventually starts catching spam at the server where it should be caught, no reason why clients can't iterate quickly to stomp out this scourge now.

I envision this feature being like a muting feature, but instead of muting on keywords, muting happens based on account metrics. Then the client could delete obvious spam tweets out of the main timeline or put them into a spam timeline.

The user should be able to take it one step further and set the client to automatically report as spam the obvious 0/0 accounts.