Tweet Blocker: Tackling Twitter Spam

For many people, spam has become the scourge of Twitter, particularly those who auto-follow to aggressively grow their number of followers.

While Twitter has been active in cutting down on spam, there’s still a lot more to be done. So, it’s not surprising to see a growing number of start-ups focused on reducing spam. One of the most interesting is Tweet Blocker, which has a tagline “Cleaning up the Twitterverse“.

For people looking to report spammers to Twitter, Tweet Blocker makes it easy by providing a tool that quickly shows whether someone has the characteristics of a spammer: they follow a lot of people but don’t have many friends. Tweet Blocker ranks Twitter users on a scale of A to F – F being a spammer.

The more interesting part of a Tweet Blocker is a tool that indexes and ranks all of your followers. Note: You have to provide your username and password.

Tweet Blocker then ranks everyone from A to F. Unfortunately, Tweet Blocker doesn’t provide details about a particular user such as their bio, the number of friends/followers, and recent Tweets. This makes it difficult to really determine if they are, in fact, spammers.

It is possible to block followers but I would suggest you be careful unless you’re keen to flush out people with a low ranking.

While Tweet Blocker is pretty easy to use and addresses a definite point of pain for many Twitter users, it needs some more polishing before it’s ready for prime time. It’s one of those services you want to like because it looks good but you’re probably better off looking for other anti-spam solutions.

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