Clean Tweets: New Add-On Zaps Twitter Spam

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:

Removes tweets from accounts that are less than 24 hours old
Removes tweets that mention three or more trending topics
Adds a red “X” to each tweet in Twitter’s search results so you can manually remove tweets and users

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:

without

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

with

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.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

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