Outside of trends, another area where this could be handy is when using Twitter as a sort of OpenId style authentication method. i.e. "Sign in with your twitter account".
Our service we have a lot of tools and algorithms in place to eradicate spam. A few months ago, we offered twitter authentication as an alternate means to create an account on our site (in addition to Facebook, OpenId, and regular password signup). As such a small subset of our users are also Twitter users and early adopters of the alternate login seemed to be spammers based on our algorithms. I assume if they are a spammer on our service they are likely a spammer on Twitter... and vice versa. A smellLikeSpam(user_id) api call to inform Twitter and a sort of X-Spam style header in the user information details would be great. Reciprocating this information might be valuable in nipping spam at the bud. IPs and URL tie ins with other Blacklists would be great as well, but might be overkill at first. Blaine On Jul 8, 10:28 am, Jeffrey Greenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm liking Andrew's thoughts regarding sensitivity to what spam is, > and am thinking about the gmail like vote-if-spam approach. > > Wondering if the api community (or really twitterers) would use an api > such as this: smellsLikeSpam( list_of_tweet_ids )... Twitter could > aggregate and apply policy to resulting votes. > > If you're doing a twitter interface app, then you've got to provide > this unpleasant activity to users which they currentl don't have to do > now. But gmail is an argument in favor of it working well and not > being too onerous on users in the aggregate. > > I think the problem in general is more dire for search-based > functionality than for general tweeting, since search picks up not > only (somewhat) older tweets but new ones and potentially in very > large quantities. So if I pick up a tweets yesterday and today it > becomes spam, I'll want to know about that and be ale to toss the > tweet (god what phrase), which has implications for apps such as mine > and for twitter too... > > .
