/dev/null/kevin

Twitter's performance problems are well known.  Twitter, and everyone else, are trying to fix the problem.  Here is my quick and dirty fix:

Kill the Spammers.

This is not a long term solution, but it may buy twitter some time to really fix the problem.

Twitter spammers don't actually spam, the don't send messages to you.  What they do it follow you, and everyone else.  Their hope is that you'll investigate their profile and then click on the web link (mine comes here to this blog).  It may also boost their search engine ranking, I don't know.

However, this also puts an extra burden on twitter.  Twitter's scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower.  The more followers people have, the slower twitter is.  The follow-spammers just increase that load.  Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people.  That's 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet.  There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.

Again, removing the spammers won't solve any of Twitter's problems, but it might give them some breathing room to work.  I think it would be easy to auto-detect most of these spammers.  If you follow more than 10,000 people and have less than 1000 followers yourself, you are probably a spammer.

I have blocked some of my more obvious spammers, but I'm not 100% sure this helps.  It depends on how Twitter implemented the blocking feature.  Hopefully they aren't checking for blocks all of the time and that the block just removed the spammer from my follow list.

I checked the Twitter forums to see if this (seemingly obvious) suggestion has been made, but I didn't have too much time to look.  I did find other people who have spammer problems, but I didn't find a discussion about Twitter removing them, or what kind of impact it would have (maybe it's just worth the trouble to them).  So, lazyweb, if you know, give me a pointer.

Update 1: I posted my own suggestion to the forum, we'll see what the response it.

Update 2: Twitter has admitted that uses with lots of followers/followees severely tax the system.  Then Rober Scoble (with his 20K+ of both) gets "blamed" for the problem.  So, I think it's only a matter of time before the spammers get the spot light.  To be clear, I don't blame Scoble.  He is a legitimate user.  Non-human spam listeneres and spam bots can be eliminated to (temporarily) free up resources so Scoble is free to tell us he is safe after earthquakes.  It's all still on Twitter's shoulders to fix the scaling problems.

How come Robert's Scoble's icult photos, people with iPhones, are all taken with a Nokia N95?