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This. Is not good:
Right now “America’s Got Talent” is a trending topic. Can’t imagine why …
How do we stop real-time spam?
1. Twitter needs to hire a person to serve as editor for Trending Topics (like Techmeme now does).
Or better still, copy the Wikipedia approach and find volunteers willing to follow strict community guidelines in policing Trending Topics. Perhaps using What The Hashtag!? (either by purchasing it or leveraging their community) would be a great place to start.
2. We should report Twitter users spamming Trending Topics to @Spam as soon as you see things like this.
If you want to keep Twitter a clean and fun experience, we need to be as vigilant as they are. Here is how you can spot a spammer on Twitter.
3. It’s going to be a while until this is resolved. We have to be patient.
Do you remember the bad old days of SEO? Pretty much every website would spam with keywords. This is what you’re seeing with Twitter now. It’s like a bad dot-com bubble re-run, right down to the i-frames. The only thing is, it’s happening way faster.
Twitter is a search enginge as much as a communications tool, and they’re new and dealing with a new issue (real-time search results). The service has not yet matured the way Google, Microsoft, and the other one have. It’s going to be a while.
Until that time, I encourage you to join me in reporting spammers as soon as you see it happening.
(Update: 2:07am EST- Twitter is thankfully getting faster at responding to situaitons like this. At this time, the trending topic for”America’s Got Talent” is gone. Great news, but remember to be vigilant as it won’t be long until the next spam trend appears.)
