Like a cancer that’s growing in twitter search, the tweetbots arrive. Dumb ones that aimlessly tweet every post on a forum to those that just retweet everything that anyone says about a topic. It seems that every time I go to search twitter, I get a never ending stream of tweet bot output. It’s like the gray goo of Twitter. Soon they’ll infest every nook and cranny of the web.
Now I realize that Twitter is a good way to market your blog or push forward other goals, but things are getting out of hand. If you can create a bot that is really sophisticated and has good filters, more power to you. But just because you have a script to scrape and tweet doesn’t mean it’s right to do so.
Twitter Search Results
Yes, I hate these. They’re easy to spot – big long lists of tweets from the same source, as shown here. As twitter is supposed to be about “social” micro-blogging by people, not rss feeds and such, I really think they should be banned before the whole twitter experience becomes so s***ty that everybody stops using it.