{"id":2972,"date":"2009-02-15T21:11:58","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T04:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/15\/the-twitter-spoofer\/"},"modified":"2009-02-16T00:00:59","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T07:00:59","slug":"the-twitter-spoofer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/15\/the-twitter-spoofer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Twitter Spoofer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently, a spammer is creating dozens of Twitter accounts, each one has one letter added to my profile name jowyang and is linking to a &#8216;get rich quick&#8217; scam.  <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/jowyang\/status\/1214242034\">I&#8217;ve received hundreds of messages<\/a> from replies, direct messages, emails, and even a long distance phone call warning me.  It&#8217;s likely a computer program, as it&#8217;s just adding one unique letter to my name, then following thousands and sending them direct messages. Many suggest that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I supposed I should be flattered.  I&#8217;m not going to link to any of these accounts not to give them any attention, but I see this as an opportunity for Twitter.<\/p>\n<p>How so?  If there was a &#8216;report spam&#8217; feature on Twitter the community (which already self-supports itself) could quickly notify the system when there&#8217;s an issue.  This type of crowd sourcing already works for Akismet, wordpress&#8217;s spam system, and could easily be applied to Twitter.  <\/p>\n<p><em>Thank you all for watching out for my brand, I appreciate each and every message. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>I sent a message to Ev and Biz, and I&#8217;m confident that Twitter will resolve this, I&#8217;m not concerned, but am thankful to all my followers.<\/p>\n<p>On a related note, Twitter needs to keep the network clean, why?  Brands are very interested in this community, I&#8217;ve been getting more and more requests from clients to discuss twitter, and whether or not they should engage and how.  Just today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/2009\/02\/14\/twitter-analytics-business-technology-ebiz_0215_twitter.html\">Forbes captured my thoughts on how I believe Twitter can monetize from corporate services, read why and how<\/a>.  <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve a report publishing soon, headed up by<a href=\"http:\/\/ampersanddot.com\/blog\/\"> Zach Hofer-Shall<\/a>, and edited by Josh Bernoff and myself, so if you&#8217;re a client, keep an eye out for it soon.<\/p>\n<p>Update: Biz sent my emaill to the support team, and a few minutes later the offending accounts were suspended.  Apparently, anyone can DM the @spam account to get this handled, I didn&#8217;t know that till now. This smells like a bot\/computer program so we should expect more of these spammer accounts to appear to others, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmorganmarketing.com\/the-twitter-attack-on-jeremiah-owyang-community-defense\/\">read Jacob&#8217;s account of the activity<\/a>.  Impressive how Twitter crew quickly cleaned this up &#8211;now that they just <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2009\/02\/13\/twitter-raises-third-round-of-funding-from-benchmark-and-ivp\/\">rounded up a cool $35mm<\/a>, high quality service is certainly expected.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently, a spammer is creating dozens of Twitter accounts, each one has one letter added to my profile name jowyang and is linking to a &lsquo;get rich quick&rsquo; scam. I&rsquo;ve received hundreds of messages from replies, direct messages, emails, and even a long distance phone &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/15\/the-twitter-spoofer\/\" class=\"more-link\"><span>Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Twitter Spoofer<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-micromedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}