TweetBlocker: Easily Delete Spammers From Your Twitter Stream
It's no secret that Twitter has become a preferred playground for spammers. Hashrocket's TweetBlocker sets out to change this by giving users a simple tool to easily identify spammers in the group of users they are following. TweetBlocker automatically identifies the spammers in your follow list and lets you easily unfollow and block them right from the TweetBlocker dashboard. Of course, if you are extremely careful about who you follow, chances are that you aren't even following a lot of spammers. If you auto-follow, however - or if you did so in the past - chances are that you are following quite a few spammers at this point.
How does TweetBlocker grade users? Among other things, it examines how active users are, as well as their ratio of friends and followers. In addition, TweetBlocker also examines the age of an account and applies Bayesian spam filtering algorithms to analyze a user's Twitter stream.
The TweetBlocker dashboard allows you to unfollow and block users individually or as a group. You can also hover over a user's avatar and see their last couple of tweets - just in case you are not quite sure if somebody is really a spammer.
Grades
Overall, TweetBlocker works just as advertised. We noticed, however, that while it did really well for those Twitter users it gave a C or D to, there were quite a few false positives among those users it graded with an F. These are supposed to be the worst of the worst spammers, but far too often they just turned out to be hapless Twitter users or people who had abandoned their accounts after a short time.
APIs, Bookmarklets, and Integration
While the website is obviously the central focus of TweetBlocker, the company also provides an API for developers, as well as a bookmarklet that allows users to report spammers to TweetBlocker directly.
As a standalone service, TweetBlocker is already quite interesting. Things might get a lot more interesting in the near future, though. Jonathan Nelson, the product director of Hashrocket, tells us that Tweetie, the popular Twitter app, will integrate TweetBlocker with the next version of its application.
Note: Whenever you suspect that somebody is indeed a spammer, you can also send a direct message to @spam, Twitter's own spam fighting account.
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This is fantastic. None of the spam-filtering services out there are perfect(I don't think they ever will be), but here's how I see it: If you accidently unfollow someone you didn't mean to, the odds are they will @ reply you and ask why you unfollowed.
Thank you for the super write up Frederic.
I would like to encourage everyone to please use our feedback area if they would like to see anything added to Tweet Blocker.
http://tweetblocker.uservoice.com
DEVELOPERS: If you are a developer and are interested in utilizing are REST API. Please shoot me an email and I'd be more than happy to assist you: jonathan@hashrocket.com.
Please remember, Tweet Blocker wouldn't exist without Twitter users like you! So please help spread the word about Tweet Blocker and eliminate spam from Twitter forever.
Thank you and we really hope you enjoy Tweet Blocker.
Jonathan Nelson
Hashrocket Labs
Product Director
Frederic,
I discovered TweetBlocker a few days ago, and was impressed by how it worked and its user-friendliness. It was part of a post I did on how to reduce Twitter spam - http://www.twitterrati.com/2009/08/03/how-to-cut-down-on-twitter-spam/.
cheers, Mark
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Email Marketing Software
O yeah? Try the service and get a C or D for your own account ;)
I absolutely never do any spam, and I got a D?
Many of my tweets were RT to Mashable tweets and RT to some other Twitter accounts like CNN, BBC, ...
The tweets, of course, contain shorten URLs, and this TweetBlocker said that I am a spammer.. LOL
I've revoked connection to TweetBlocker, a dangerous UTK robot, "Unmanned Twitterer Killer".
This autonomous robot, with no human operator at all to do its decisions, does not have the necessary artificial intelligence for a discriminatory ability.
The most danger is about the proportionality, there's no software that can make a robot proportional. There's no objective calculus of proportionality - it's just a decision that people make.
It's like what UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) did in a drone attack, 15 enemies were killed, but other 500 civilians death also.
Should they think about the ethics to do unmanned false judging on those "social" media called Twitter.
the only thing that concerns me about TweetBlocker is it may give my followers a lower grade simply because they aren't as active and aren't necessarily spammers. this was cause for my hesitation to unfollow anybody. some users may simply want to use you as a news feed, and this is unfair to grade them lower.
I want to say this is cool and useful but for some reason I'm sure there are going to be a lot of legit accounts that are going to be blocked. For example business accounts may be blocked because of the group of people they follow, everyone!
I'd love to see how the stats prove the system.
On net if anythings catches fancy, there is definitely going to be the spam for that thing For e.g blog, email, twitter, optimisation etc. With every such useful application, there has to be way out to witherout the SPAM to make any good application useful.
I checked out either this one or one of these services. I received a possible spammer grade simply because 1 person out of 5K blocked me. Did they block on purpose or accident? Was it because I reversed spammed them or asked them to interact? Or did I tweet to heavy for them. I send out a lot of links and a lot of RT's.
The second reason it had me as POSSIBLE spammer was I used an unauthorized tweet application.. OKAY I use tr.im so what? My other account I do not use the tr.im to post from and it was graded better.
I do not like these arbitrary things. BUT this has prompted me to go through and unfollow those that are just posting with no personality .. you know the add 100K followers in 3 days.