Comments on: How Twitter Can Fix Direct Message Spam

By: Utah Web Design | Bent Design Studio

Utah Web Design | Bent Design Studio — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:50:05 +0000

This is driving me crazy. Has anyone found a way to stop this! Thank you so much for this post. We really need to resolve this issue.

By: The Direct Message Dilemma « SEO by Swaby – Utah SEO, SEM & Social Media

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:48:26 +0000

[...] Singley has a suggestion for Twitter, allow a separate controller for direct messages so a user can turn it off without unfollowing. [...]

By: Trackback - Free Internation Call >> How to make free international call

Trackback - Free Internation Call >> How to make free international call — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:02:40 +0000

,[...] mattsingley.com is one another nice source of information on this subject,[...]

By: Alex Schleber

Alex Schleber — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:27:26 +0000

Matt, what you propose is well-intentioned, but I’m not sure that it would address the root causes of phishing and other DM spam issues:

1) Twitter DMs are mostly broken right now anyway. How? No search, no filter by user, no threading, no folders/tags, no archive/trash (most of this applies to FB too BTW). Why does it have to do a pop-up asking me if I want to delete permanently? Use 1 click, and just don’t delete permanently.

If you could trash DMs with 1 click, I suspect you wouldn’t care ass much about spammy ones flowing in. I am not saying that Twitter DMs need to become like full-fledged “private label” email, but it wouldn’t hurt to have them be a little more useful. FriendFeed DMs are a decent model (they have search, threading, & link expansion/inline images).

2) Twitter needs to do a better job of nipping the next wave of phishing DMs in the bud. They need to beef up their internal security filters on DMs (and regular tweets), monitor links, and shut down the forwarding once flagged. Bit.ly is already doing some of this I believe. So if Bit.ly takes care of their end, then Twitter could monitor the rest of the URL shorteners (bit.ly makes up what, 60% now?).

3) Some of these issues go a lot deeper than just Twitter. They are internet protocol issues (I’ve ranted against the idiocy of email SMTP not requiring sender authentication for years, asf.).