Spam, Spam and more Spam! It first started with the neighborhood bank ‘representatives’ calling up on your mobile ‘informing’ you about the latest ‘interesting’ offers on their credit cards. Then it extended to email inboxes, your Orkut Scraps and now, onto the next big thing in social media, Twitter. How many times have you received an email from Twitter, telling you that you are being followed by the likes of “hotbod365″ and “freewebcam”? Of course, every single follower notification is always music to the ears. However, when you visit the user’s profile, with intentions to check out his updates and follow him back, and figure out that his updates aren’t really that politically correct, how does that make you feel?

Well, welcome to the world of Spam 2.0 and in the attempt to curb this menace, Twitter has come up with a pretty stringent solution. First, Twitter started to weed out the bots’ accounts on its own, sparking up rage and frustrations in the blogosphere with people complaining about losing their followers! Then, Twitter has this brilliant idea of limiting the maximum number of feeds an user can follow. No, Ev Williams has made it clear on the GigaOm blog that Twitter will not limit the number of users who can follow you and but, rather, the other way round. Of course, limiting the number of followers is a stupid idea ‘coz that will always piss off the more popular updaters, forcing them to migrate to other services, also taking their followers along with them.

However, they are also not limiting the number of users you can follow, to a perfect number of 2,000, as originally reported by most of the blogs. According to their official blog,

…there is no perfect formula. We do our best by taking a multi-dimensional approach. We look at a number of factors—including how many people are following you back—before applying limits. We don’t reveal exact limits, because it’s somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google’s PageRank, they’d just engineer their way around them much more easily.

Although it might sound a bit shady, in a way, the fact that spammers will always find a workaround once they realize your algorithm, is true too. Say, for example, the limit had been set to 2,000. All a spammer / attention seeker needs to do is follow 500 people a day and give them 3 days to follow him back. After those 3 days, he simply unfollows the ones who didn’t follow back and moves on to prey on other suspects.

Twitter Blog also says,

We intend to allow you to follow at least as many people as follow you, though there are cases where that might not yet be the case. We will fix that.

So, it seems, Twitter users shall not only have to face the wrath of the fail-whale but shall also have to be always in the panic, in the fear of upsetting Twitter’s spam detecting algorithm. We understand that such measures were necessary in their effort to make the fail-whale vanish away. What amuses us is the fact that rather than increasing the habitat space to accommodate the complete ecosystem, Twitter has decided to limit the ecosystem itself. Frankly, I, personally, shall never care if I find a spammer or a bot following me. I always follow people very discreetly. It’s not the users who get adversely affected by the spammers. We feel, such a step has been taken solely to reduce the load on twitter servers. If Calacanis is to be believed, if Ev does has access to unlimited funds, then what’s stopping him from improving the infrastructure behind Twitter’s servers, rather than taking drastic steps like this?

What’s more appalling is the fact that, instead of actually announcing a limiting number, you just leave it to be decided by an algo. I understand that announcing such values shall allow spammers to find a work around, but truthfully, I’d always prefer the spammers getting their way than iring the regular and more faithful users of the system. It is something like the word of the law. “Every man is innocent unless and until proven guilty.” While trying to follow this principle, many a guilty walks freely today, but at least, there ain’t many innocent facing the noose!

The very reason Twitter has come all this way is the way it has facilitated one-to-many communication to the netizens. The only feature that i can compare it to, is the “Ask Question” feature on Orkut, where one can ask one single question and float it into thin air, answerable by anyone in his freinds list. Twitter has truely managed to enable people to share the knowledge and also gain from it. Every user knows his/her own audience and thus helps in creating cohesion and a sense of utility among the users.

It’s a wait and watch situation, now! While many blogs are already suggesting Twitter to go the premium way and start charging for services, I shall rather ask the micro-blogging platform to wait up for some more time till is hits the ‘critical mass’. I like what Calacanis says,

Once you have critical mass you can’t help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money. Done! Game Over!!

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