Let’s say you’ve a decent number of people following you on Twitter. Well, you may think that the reason why they follow you is because of your cheeky character, funny and interesting tweets. Think twice. To be honest, a few of them are actually bots or spammers whose main intention is to market their products to you. Browsing through hundreds of pages to either remove or block automated bots is indeed a tedious job. This is when a junk filter and bulk blocking tool called TwitBlock comes in really handy.
Although there are already quite a number of services out there which let Twitter users to identify and block spammers, but TwitBlock do so in an unique, creative and light-hearted approach to booting unwanted followers. Currently in Alpha version, TwitBlock makes use of a simple clever scanner which analyzes your followers for signs of “spammy” behavior and ranks them in terms of scores. Of course, the higher the spam score, the greater the amount of spam a particular user produces.
UK developer, Tim Whitlock behind TwitBlock said that he is trying his best to improve the accuracy of the scoring mechanism as far as possible so that it could theoretically be used to automatically filter spam out like an email junk filter endeavors. At the moment, 8 different tests are performed in the standard TwiBlock scan. It includes ignore factor (“inverse popularity”), follow rate, blocked by others, identical profile avatars, tweets via API, missing profile info, username looks dodgy and last but not least spammy words in bio and status.
To start, simply give the follower scan a whirl by logging in via Twitter OAuth. The system will then grab data from your profile and does the relevant tests. Of course, if you’ve a loyal following of people, it’ll take quite a while to display the list of spammers. After which, you can start blocking your spammiest followers with just a click of the mouse. As simple as that.
Hackers and spammers have been always the threat to social networking website such as Facebook and Twitter for the past few years. Tim Whitlock aims to use TwitBlock to raise awareness, and hopefully educate Twitter users about how to avoid falling foul of cons and phishing traps.