Say no to Pspam

Those of you who’ve been following my Trying to work out how to use Twitter antics will already know that I’m still not 100% convinced.

Yet would it surprise you to hear that there is spam in Twitter? Probably not. But this is a different kind of spam. I call it Pspam – pointless spam.

This is how it works. It starts with a number of services who, among other things, will automatically send out a Direct Message to anyone who follows your Twitter account.

Let’s take a step back and think about what’s going on here.

We’ll assume that you’re a perfectly ordinary person who’s recently opened a Twitter account.

You search for the term AdWords, come across some of my comments, and decide to follow me.

Moments later, your first “contact” from me comes in:

“Thanks for following me on twitter. I look forward to getting to know you better.”

That’s nice, you think. You follow a few more people, and then notice that quite a lot of these messages are coming in.

At this point you realise it’s automated, and the “nice” goes out of the window.

With hundreds of Direct Messages, I’m annoyed, but I’m also intrigued.

First of all, as far as I can see, none of them are for me. They’re all automated. And if there is a real message in there for me, it’s lost in the noise.

Second of all, they’re almost all pointless. There are one or two plugs for blogs, but mostly they’re variations of “Thanks for the follow. How are you today?“. Look at the following sample:

When I choose to follow you on Twitter, I’ve decided that you might be an interesting person to listen to.

If the first thing I get from you is (a) automated (b) boring and (c) pointless, you immediately make me question my initial judgement.

If there was a tool or service that would automatically recognise these automated annoyances, I’d use it, and I’d instantly stop following those accounts.

If you’re one of the people who sends out these auto-annoyances, might I suggest that you turn it off?