Recently active topics in Twitter

If you view the new Twitter search (search.twitter.com) you will notice shortened-links can be "Expanded" to show the full URL.

I think this feature should be applied across the site. Allowed any URL to be expanded, so you can view the location of the link, before you click.

When entering a long URL it doesn't get converted to a tinyURL before posting. However, all the characters of the URL are being counted. So when you enter a long URL that makes you go over the 140 character limit you can't finish your Tweet and submit it because the "update" button gets greyed out. However, after posting the URL will get shortened and then there would have been enough characters left to type more text to accompany the URL.

I'm not really sure about possible solutions to this, but some ideas are:

Give us a special box for entering an URL and give us a "Convert and insert into Tweet" button. This way the short URL gets entered so that the amount of characters is counted correctly right away.

Let Twitter recognize longer URLs while a Tweet is being typed. This way Twitter can recognize an URL longer than 30 characters and count this as 25 characters (which it will be after converting to a tinyUR). I don't know how long tinyURLs can get so perhaps counting 30 characters for a tinyURL would be safer.

Thanks!

Concept:

Twitter spam mitigation via SURBL applied to young Follow ratio inequity accounts

Synopsis:

Twitter should use SURBL checking against all published URL pushed by early life accounts for 90 days where a Follower to Following ratio is greater than ~100:1 as part of building a minor reputation score.

Details:

Based on what I have noticed since being on the service, there are a lot of spammer and developer possibilities right now. As Twitter operations and devel hooks have cranked down on certain areas there has been gravitation to other exploits or testing of the system.

A typical spammer account has the following characteristics:

1) < 10 followers with auto follow NOT selected
2) following +1000
3) +1 post with a obvious SURBL hit i.e. a spamvertized URL
4) Less than 90 days old

Considering how Blogger has dealt with these issues and other form based services, Twitter should use SURBL filters.

Proliferation:

Of course, obfuscation via shorter URL services might crop up overnight but these are also easily tracked in the XMPP aggregate to a manageable level. Consider that 100 new accounts of the form {girlname}{bigint} are likely not real people, are bots, and bots bent on spamvertising a single URL.

Secondarily, as with any emerging reputation system there will be shill creation and shill for hire if a follower reputation is created based on auto-follow classification.

Third, it is likely that any internal algorithm will eventually be gamed as the corpus of user creation maps to larger and more automated applications. 90 days is a sliding scale that will require tuning.

Afterword and Suggestions

While I appreciate the effect of growing net new accounts for Twitter via bot techniques of spammers -- it starts to feel like Blogger. I'd like to suggest that Twitter consider

a) SURBL implementation guided by community inputs and tempered by anti-spam leaders

b) shortly thereafter ratify or endorse a SURBL compliant (stated) URL shortening service

Conclusion

Enforcing reputation and checks against SURBL removes a key vector being used by these namespace and follow approaches by the current run of spammers on Twitter.

Enhancement Request - When people use hashtags in thier tweets, hyperlink them to Twitter Search results for the hashtag (similar to @ replies), so, if I tweeted about #IMS08, you would automatically link that to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%2... This would help people follow the discussions more easily, and make more people use Twitter Search too.

Thanks! @mvolpe ( www.Twitter.com/mvolpe )