I just wanted to write a quick post to publicly ponder the question, why does it seem that Twitturly is the only site of our kind that realized that if you are monitoring the twitter public time line that you would need to include spam filtering and learning techniques?

Lately twitter has been getting a ton of press and is gaining in popularity among the average Internet users quite quickly. As such, the spammers have already determined that they could spam twitter users and get people to their site - which frankly, sucks.

Twitter is a service for getting tweets out, not for spam prevention. It would be nice of them to be able to determine if a message was spam and not let it hit the public timeline, but they have far more important things to do that add that capability to their systems.

I won’t name any names, but sadly, in the past few days, most of the services that are similar to twitturly have suffered from these spammers. Often times, retweeting the original spam message and making it even worse.

So I ask this question to anyone building anything off of twitter, if you haven’t built in your own spam filtering services for twitter that your service can use to prevent abuse of it, then why not?

Feel free to answer in the comments below.