Jun 16, 2009 at 1:58pm ET by Matt McGee
If you use Twitter regularly, you probably know spam is a growing problem — particularly with Twitter’s search engine and the way it surfaces trending topics. Danny Sullivan described how spammers are targeting hot keywords in his Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem article 10 days ago.
Since Twitter hasn’t addressed the problem yet, the folks behind the BLVD Status web analytics tool have created Clean Tweets, a Firefox add-on that, in my brief testing, does a good job eliminating spam from Twitter search/hot topics. According to the Clean Tweets page, the tool does three thing to cut down on spam:
You can also customize each of those options to suit your own tastes; i.e., you might consider removing tweets that mention two or more trending topics.
Does it work? Have a look at these screenshots. The first one shows the “Father’s Day” trending topic on Twitter search before I installed Clean Tweets:

And this second one shows the same group of results after I installed Clean Tweets.

The add-on removed two tweets, both of which are spam, and both which came from accounts created within the last 24 hours.
If you’re a Firefox user, you can get more info and/or download Clean Tweets on the BLVD Status site.
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Premium member since 01/2009
Very cool Matt. Now we just gotta get something similar that works in tweetdeck. Would be great to filter out spam from the streams we search.