http://crashdev.disqus.com/enThu, 05 Nov 2009 12:27:55 -0000http://crashdev.com/2009/11/spam-bashing-on-twitter-true-story/#comment-21955439<p>Hi Adam - thanks for getting in touch and sharing some of the details<br>about how you guys are dealing with this. Sounds like you recognized<br>the problem quickly and have taken some great steps to get "on the<br>right side of the fence" as you put it. My purpose with the post<br>wasn't to single out Chorus, but more to point to the risks to Twitter<br>as a platform created by its scriptability. I appreciate you taking<br>the time to let me (and my readers) know how you're dealing with it -<br>kudos to you and the Chorus team for getting out in front of this.</p>Chris DeVoreThu, 05 Nov 2009 12:27:55 -0000http://crashdev.com/2009/11/spam-bashing-on-twitter-true-story/#comment-21922275<p>Hello Chris. I see that you are the CEO at AppStore. Thank you, first of all for building the tool and for writing this blog post.</p><p>I'm overseeing just a bit of Chorus' online outreach by connecting to users and building a relationship so naturally I just discovered your post. I'm the first to admit and agree that Twitter is easily "gameable" and can be used to spread something through viral methods with only a few lines of code. However, there is care and work that can be done so that we ,as an application that interfaces with Twitter, are on the right side of the fence and not the side responsible for the noise.</p><p>At launch, we ask for your Twitter credentials and in the first 4 hours after launch, we were careless in how tweets were handled which caused a bit of pushback from less then 4% of users. However, we made a server side change yesterday that explicitly says how we'll be tweeting and if you want to opt-out. Today, the amount of Twitter noise from our application dropped about 85% from yesterday's numbers so clearly the change worked despite our download numbers staying consistent.</p><p>So, with this said, we are actively improving the app to ensure such "spam" isn't carelessly put out on the web but Twitter is also a valuable marketing tool for us and we encourage users to connect Twitter to their account not with spammy offers and scams but with the intention of "connect with your friends and get better application recommendations". This has proved to be incentive enough for users to continue their auto-tweets.</p><p>I hope that clears a few things up and I encourage you to reach out to us if you have any questions.</p>Adam ChandlerThu, 05 Nov 2009 01:45:17 -0000http://crashdev.com/2009/11/spam-bashing-on-twitter-true-story/#comment-21920088<p>Twitter is definitely the new target for spammers.</p><p>You should create a list of the spammiest iPhone apps.</p>davenaffThu, 05 Nov 2009 00:37:49 -0000