Twitter is the new Spam

I've been on Twitter now for a short while and I still find it a strange beast. There seem to be some folk who are incredibly addicted to using Twitter. One Twit called Military_mom is reported to have recently tweeted to her followers from the bedside of her dying son. This was greeted with shock, including by many in the Twitter community. My guess is that she viewed it as no different from keeping friends informed about about something terrible in her life and in one sense I can understand that. But to feel the urge to do this in the middle of her crisis with people who she has shared little more than a 140 character conversation with seems very strange to me.

Marf and I managed to locate each other in Twitter and I got a good tip from him which means that my Feedburner feed tweets a link to my latest post. Now all I need to do is to figure out a way to turn my tweets into posts to my blogs and I'll never need to touch the keyboard again.

Just think about it - I could make one post and Feedburner would then tweet this. My Tweet to blogpost software would then take the tweet of my post and post that. My Feedburner would then take the post of the tweeted post and tweet it. At this point I would have a tweet of a posted tweet of a post. I could set up a complete and continuous conversation with myself and never have to worry about having time to put up a new post. I could effectively spam myself into oblivion.

And getting spammed into oblivion seems to be one possible fate of Twitter. There are a lot of spammy tweets on twitter and indications are that people are expecting this to get worse. Given that Adwords cleared out a few hundred thousand spammy adword accounts only a week or two back then it wont be surprising if at least a few of these guys turn up there.

The big problem seems likely to be that some users are using bots to automate their tweets and that the only thing that they are posting is spam.

All of which makes me wonder if it is simply unavoidable that any new Internet technology will get swarmed upon by people wanting to use it for their commercial interests. I guess it's human nature.

We all seem to accept that big businesses will fill our lives with advertising but at the end of the day is their motivation much different from the people who are spamming twitter?