Recently active topics in Twitter tagged with followers

It would be nice to be able to organize followers by most recent to start following you. I'd also like to know who has notifications turned on for me.

My idea is for a stripped down followers API which would just return the nickname and id of all followers (fields "name" and "id" in the current JSON output).

I've built a followers "history" tool (lets me track the addition/subtraction of followers through time). I'm finding I'm getting back the latest status for each follower and the follower's bio information even if I make a "lite" request (appending "lite=true" to the request).

Until oAuth (or something else) is deployed, returning all followers in such a request would eliminate additional API requests.

I wish there was a way that I could have to approve followers, yet not make my profile hidden. Is this possible? I want a level of privacy that is in between what is currently offered... I know my public feed is available to see, but having people follow me means they will watch my every move. I'd just like to be able to approve who does that instead of getting strangers following me so often. Blocking them just seems harsh.

I would like to see a tab for Followers where I can read what my followers are saying but the tab should exclude people I'm already following.

If I find their tweets interesting, funny, or informative, I would follow them and they would no longer be in my Followers tab.

Concept:

Twitter spam mitigation via SURBL applied to young Follow ratio inequity accounts

Synopsis:

Twitter should use SURBL checking against all published URL pushed by early life accounts for 90 days where a Follower to Following ratio is greater than ~100:1 as part of building a minor reputation score.

Details:

Based on what I have noticed since being on the service, there are a lot of spammer and developer possibilities right now. As Twitter operations and devel hooks have cranked down on certain areas there has been gravitation to other exploits or testing of the system.

A typical spammer account has the following characteristics:

1) < 10 followers with auto follow NOT selected
2) following +1000
3) +1 post with a obvious SURBL hit i.e. a spamvertized URL
4) Less than 90 days old

Considering how Blogger has dealt with these issues and other form based services, Twitter should use SURBL filters.

Proliferation:

Of course, obfuscation via shorter URL services might crop up overnight but these are also easily tracked in the XMPP aggregate to a manageable level. Consider that 100 new accounts of the form {girlname}{bigint} are likely not real people, are bots, and bots bent on spamvertising a single URL.

Secondarily, as with any emerging reputation system there will be shill creation and shill for hire if a follower reputation is created based on auto-follow classification.

Third, it is likely that any internal algorithm will eventually be gamed as the corpus of user creation maps to larger and more automated applications. 90 days is a sliding scale that will require tuning.

Afterword and Suggestions

While I appreciate the effect of growing net new accounts for Twitter via bot techniques of spammers -- it starts to feel like Blogger. I'd like to suggest that Twitter consider

a) SURBL implementation guided by community inputs and tempered by anti-spam leaders

b) shortly thereafter ratify or endorse a SURBL compliant (stated) URL shortening service

Conclusion

Enforcing reputation and checks against SURBL removes a key vector being used by these namespace and follow approaches by the current run of spammers on Twitter.