Twitter is having all kinds of down time. I'm sure a lot of it is due to the system's use by spammers. We could ALL benefit by steps taken to reduce spamming on Twitter.

How about making it a bit tougher to set up a Twitter account? To make it a little more difficult for spammers to set up multiple accounts to spread their spam via follow?

For example:
- Require a verifiable e-mail address.
- Allow only one Twitter account per address.
- Prevent a new Twitter account from being set up from a cancelled e-mail address.

And then prevent anyone from following more than a certain number of people based on who is following them. For example, prevent a user from following more than 10 people for each person who follows them. Or only allow a certain number of new follows per hour/day/week/whatever.

Or maybe prevent users from having more than a certain percentage of tweets that include links. For example, no more than 75% of tweets can be links.

And automatically prevent duplicate tweets. Or the same link being shared over and over by a single twitter user.

And encouraging people to simply BLOCK spammers. Then look at which accounts are being blocked and delete the obvious spam accounts.

Come on, guys. Do SOMETHING! Between down time and spamming, Twitter is quickly losing its charm.

Just search summize for Squidoo! You'll find 1genitalherpes and cureforherpes, partybaff and partybfe, sportsbetting, MAYBE BettyA1 (she's talking about Cyprus, not the typical spam stuff).

And of course, I could never forget PatrioticTees.

Lately, I've been getting spam profiles following me nearly daily. It's getting rather annoying and someone needs to do something about it.

To help solve the problem, I believe we need to have some sort of spam repository.

If someone flags another profile (not just blocking them), anyone after that the flagee follows has the flagee automatically added to a list of potential problem profiles to be confirmed. Once the flagee was confirmed enough times, they're automatically taken out of the repository until someone else adds them. You wouldn't have to call it a Spam or anything, keep it vague to make sure no one feels singled out.

Just an idea. I'd love to work with getting this setup. Something like Akismet (blog comment spam blocker; http://akismet.com/) for Twitter would be amazing and pretty easy to impliment.

It would be really helpful if new follower notifications Twitter sends via email included the number of followers this person has. I get notifications from random people and I've never added anyone who follows more than a few hundred people (usually people trying to game twitter). That is, the notification email "So-and-so is following you" is much less helpful than "So-And-so is following you. She is following 30,000 people."

I think it would be a good idea to set a time frame for people to allow somebody to follow them. I have blocked just about every person that has started following me because I don't think that they are even reading my tweets. If they were, they would have noticed the posts that say "message me first or I will block you." Is there a term for people following well over 30,000 people? I know they are not reading all those posts.

An option to allow people to follow would be an excellent feature to add. Maybe a timeframe e.g. if I have not allowed a person to follow in X amount of days they are removed from my list. This would be an excellent way for people to keep their account spam free.

Just an idea.....Thanks for reading.

- Solucid

I'd like to see some changes to the list of people who are following me.

1. Like others, I'd like to be able to easily see who recently began following me. I think this would best be done as a sort.

2. It would be nice if there was a little status next to each follower, with the following information: a. how many other people this person follows and b. how many people follow this person.

I find that I'm usually not interested in following someone who also follows over 1000 other Twitterers, since that often seems like spam. Of course, there are always exceptions.

A very nice and useful feature would be the ability to filter out (block) tweets from one's feed that contain user-specified words or phrases.

It will also go a long way towards curbing porn and other spam once it hits Twitter.