Is Twitter about to crackdown hard on spammers?
This week SocialToo wrote a blog post about how they are going to discontinue their auto unfollow feature. The auto unfollow feature basically automatically unfollows anyone that isn’t following you. (thus the name) So if you friend someone, they friend you back and eventually unfriend you SocialToo will unfollow them back for you. SocialToo paints this as a relationship-building tool where it allows you to follow someone else instead. Because Twitter restricts the amount of people you can follow (the initial 2K limit and the 10% discrepancy) you can look at it that way. It is certainly much more harmless than someone that churns their followers to build numbers.
Starting Feburary 1st they will no longer offer this feature. From their blog:
Per their request, we have been asked to remove our automatic unfollow service by the end of the month or risk having our service disabled. They claim that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”. We want to respect Twitter’s request, as ultimately we are in their environment and subject to their own rules. So long as we are using their API we have to play by their rules, and I respect that.
Refollow.com also made an unannounced change to how their tool works. With Refollow you used to be able to scan all of your followers and unfollow anyone who isn’t following you. Starting this week you are no longer able to scan past a certain % of your follower count. This means that you can only unfollow people who you have recently added. (This is a pretty big crackdown for people who churn their friend’s list heavily. Usually a tactic of internet marketers and spammers.) (UPDATE: It looks like Refollow got the same message SocialToo did as well. Here are some updates from their Twitter stream.)
I don’t disagree with either change. I found it interesting though because I remember when MySpace was growing rapidly and a lot of marketers began to use programs to add friends on MySpace, post bulletins, post comments, and message people. At one point it made the service almost unbearable to use because you logged in and had to delete a slew of messages, friends requests, and comments from your page. It took MySpace awhile to react to this and put real protections in but when they did they went too far and instituted a CAPTCHA system that became a massive pain in the ass to the regular user. (This wasn’t really corrected until you could verify your account via cell phone.)
Of course the MySpace issue was a little different because people were scrapping the site where Twitter issues are coming through the API they let developers use. Because they have control over who has access to the API they can institute rules and policy to curb abuse of their system. With MySpace it was more of a cat and mouse game on how people were abusing their site. This is a tribute to how Twitter is set up, they knew that these tools were out there and how they were being used. Instead of creating an adversarial relationship with developers they allowed an ecosystem to be created, for people to use the service, and then they could go back after all of this was established and make corrections to it.
Twitter can now take a pretty level-headed approach that doesn’t hurt the user experience of the average user as opposed to making a massive shift that hurts everyone involved.
What do you think of Twitter’s new policies, is it to curb spam?
Kevein – this is a breath of fresh air. It’s going to be fun to watch the evolution of twitter over the next couple of years. This is no doubt the number 1 issue they need to get their arms around.