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Twitter, for the uninitiated is a kind of messaging tool that allows family members or colleagues to stay in touch though simple status updates. It's simplicity is perhaps it's biggest appeal. With messages up to 140 characters and a very straightforward system of following the people you want to keep up to date with, it should be straight forward and hassle free. Sadly though, Twitter is still susceptible to usual forms of abuse and annoyances that have plagued Internet services for years.
Twitter random followers (read spammers)
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Perhaps this is to be expected when something becomes popular. As with the notorious and somewhat over hyped Facebook, as soon as word gets out about something new, suddenly everyone wants piece of the action. Before you know it, it's imperative that every business out there must have a Twitter account so that they can 'keep their customers informed' of their new products and services. Well that's all very well. It's good that people find this new thing useful, but then a few crafty individuals start thinking 'how can I make some money with this' and before you know it, some genius has just created a new thing called 'Twitter Spam'. That wonderfully useful communication tool suddenly becomes annoying.
Back to those random followers (read spammers). They're easy enough to spot because they're following thousands of people and they either have very few updates (tweets), or all their updates are from API. In other words those tweets have probably generated automatically from a database or application. Why would I be interested in something like that? I could of course prevent my updates going on to the public time line, but there again sometimes real and interesting people follow and I'm interested enough to follow back. I could ignore them but I usually end up just blocking them straight away.
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