The Cure for Twitter SPAM

Remember when you watched the Disney classic Bambi for the first time and you learned that, for all the chaos and destruction they cause, forest fires are necessary for the ecosystem to survive and thrive? That was an especially poignant message for me as a young person growing up in Southern California…

Robert Scoble has unleashed a forest fire on his Twitter following, and I remember when Loic Le Meur and Jason Calanis did the same thing back in February.

Zero Tolerance

It seems that each individual has a threshold for the number of Twitter followers they can follow back until the SPAM gets to them. I’m reaching my point now… As countless Get Rich Quick schemes permeate the service, an unadulterated increase in Twitter followers also results in an increase in SPAM tweets and SPAM direct messages.

Up to this point, I have personally maintained a strict tit for tat policy with regards to following people on Twitter:

If followed,then follow back
If unfollowed, then unfollow back

It’s a sound game theory, but I’m beginning to wonder if there is a point to applying it to Twitter. Especially if I don’t read my follower stream, without the help of Seesmic, because of its oppressiveness. I think that I miss the days of being able to eagerly go through my stream on my iPhone and catch solid tweets from people I knew or wanted to know…

Things have changed, and I’m on the fence.

What Do You Think?

Should I be having second thoughts about the way I use Twitter? Can a man’s thinking evolve the longer he uses a tool? Or do I just need to get over myself? How do you use Twitter?