ReadWriteWeb

Twitter is requiring password resets for users who signed up for "suspicious" third-party programs that promise to automatically (or magically) get them followers. Twitter usually pushes out password resets to users whose accounts it believes have been compromised due to phishing or other attacks.

"We're currently pushing out password resets to users who signed up for 3rd party follower-adder sites linked to suspicious behavior," Twitter said earlier today on the account it uses to gather and spread information about spam, @spam.

SocialToo just announced a number of new features that will allow Twitter users to fight the increasing amount of direct messaging (DM) spam, which is becoming a major hassle on Twitter. SocialToo can now replace the default email messages that Twitter normally sends out when a user receives a DM with a customized email from SocialToo itself. These emails will allow users to immediately flag another user as a spammer and block any further messages from their account. In addition, SocialToo is also launching its own spam filter, with which users can block DMs based on a user-defined list of keywords and phrases like "get 500 new followers a day" or "make money."

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.

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.

According to spam-filtration service BotKiller, Twitter spam comprises up to 3.69 percent of all tweets.

They've been working on a solution to cleanse the stream of Twitter spam; their new product tags and blocks computer-generated tweets with a minimal margin of false positives. BotKiller is a product of Rarefied Technologies, an open-source company that implements advanced algorithmic classification for enterprise applications.