Is Twitter Being Used to Attack Blogs? We Still Need Social Feeds.

An older post on my personal blog, If Scoble Thinks He Found Bad Startup Marketing, He Ain’t Seen Nothing  received several comments this morning, all showing the same structure, pointing back to Twitter accounts – some are clearly spam accounts with only this one update, but others appear to be real users, although I am not following any of them.  Here are a few examples:

lbfd (LBFD) | January 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm e

This is a test.

(This appears to be a spam account with no real content.)

aleslie2 (Art Leslie) | January 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm e

Hmmm … tweet completely disappeared. This is a test.

(This appears to be a real account.)

bisfourbritt (bisfourbritt) | January 13th, 2009 at 9:52 pm e

This is a test. Nd it ends with no friends. We will go on…..untl it hurts

Zonin with loud shit tonightt hah

(This appears to be a real account.)

radiomanmic (Michael Grider) | January 13th, 2009 at 11:28 pm e

This is a test. Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through.

(This appears to be a real account.)

deborahgtaylor (deborahgtaylor) | January 14th, 2009 at 6:10 am e

Is going to Brenham for a quilting lesson. This is a test.

(This appears to be a real account.)

cineola (cineola) | January 14th, 2009 at 7:14 am e

This is a test.

(This appears to be a spam account with no real content.)

You won’t see the original spam comments on my blog anymore, I’ve started to remove them, hoping that Akismet  and Spam Karma 2 will quickly learn…

Ironically help came from the very same source the attacks came from: Twitter.  Eran asked if I had installed the Tweetbacks WordPress Plugin,  which sent a lot of comment spam his way:

@ZoliErdos you installed TweetBacks? I was getting a lot of commen t spam bcz of it 31 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to ZoliErdos

ekampf

Sudar had similar ideas:

@ZoliErdos I guess someone is writing a new (spam) bot using Twitter API and is using your blog as the test bed. 🙂 20 minutes ago from web in reply to ZoliErdos

sudarmuthu

Well, I did attempt to install Tweetbacks a few days ago, although the installation failed – or so I thought.  Perhaps that’s the culprit – I’ve just removed it completely.  For now the attacks have stopped.

What does this all mean?  For one, we have to be careful installing plugins.  But I don’t want to entirely write off Tweetbacks and similar ones.   My long-time readers may recall I always complained about losing half of the conversation – the part that relates to blog posts, but takes place off-blog.  I was obviously happy when the first early comment tracking systems arrived: coComment , MyComments and co.mments (RIP).

Then came the more sophisticated ones: Intense Debate, Disqus,  SezWho and others. Finally the conversation moved off blogs almost entirely: for now it appears to be on Twitter and FriendFeed.    One possible approach is to make FriendFeed one’s Conversation Central, since everything comes together there.  But I still believe for a micro-publisher (if you write a blog, you are a publisher) there is value in bringing the complete flow together: for now it is feeding back relevant entries from Twitter and FriendFeed.  I’ve been lazy but will implement it soon on my WordPress blog, and I hope we will have the capability soon here @ CloudAve, too.

Related posts:

• Is TweetBacks getting spammed already?
• Twitter Spam