Frederic Lardinois’ article on March 23, 2010 refers to Twitter’s assertion that spam is not an issue. According to the latest data from Twitter, the percentage of spammy tweets per day is now down under 1%.

Here’s the issue. Our stats don’t support this assertion.

In fact, our numbers suggest that spammers are alive and well on Twitter. How do we arrive at this conclusion? In December of 2009 we launched TwitSweeper. Its only function is to detect undesirable followers (spam and spammers), identify them, and list them so TwitSweeper users can choose to remove and block them. It does this very well.

Here’s what we know.

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“Reciprocal following” is when you follow the people who follow you on Twitter. Sounds harmless, even nice. But don’t be fooled. Many problems are caused by this practice. Reciprocal following should be discontinued — here’s why. Read More »

When TwitSweeper first launched in public beta and started removing people’s spammy followers from their Twitter accounts, it was available for free trial and after the trial, for a low annual fee. However, shorter payment periods are now also available. Read More »

We take twitter spam seriously around here. We often use words like spam, spammers and undesirables. And it always leads to the same question: “what is spam?” Read More »

Twitter is still in its infancy. The question is; could spam come to dominate Twitter to the same degree that spam overwhelms email traffic? I sure hope not. Read More »

Request for User Feedback on Proposed Change to TwitSweeper

BACKGROUND: When TwitSweeper finds spammy or otherwise undesirable followers on a user’s Twitter account, it queues those followers for confirmation. When the user returns to TwitSweeper, they are presented with a list of the undesirable followers and asked to confirm (or retain) them. These undesirable followers are currently displayed in one long list. Read More »

In the past few weeks we have received some great feedback from our private testers. We have implemented new features based on the initial feedback and we are very happy to announce TwitSweeper is now in Public Beta. Read More »

Here at The Dustpan, we are striving to help you protect yourself from spammers. With Twitter becoming more and more popular everyday, spammers will try to weasel their way into our daily lives. Read More »