Twitter search spam

The growth follwing Twitter's recent PR attention seems to be entering a new phase as some of the web's less salubrious inhabitants are being drawn to the platform. Search results against any of today's top trending topics return a page full of what can only be described as spam tweets. A search against #jonaslive returned the following:

For those without a magnifying glass, Kelly_Johnson is in short keen for us to check out her webcam (I didn't by the way!) and is using multiple tweets featuring all the day's top trending topics in the hope of driving some free traffic.

Does this kind of activity mark the beginning of the end for Trending Topics usefulness or at least its ease of use? Even if Twitter techies can filter out spam like this it seems clear that some consideration for relevance to user is central to search and trending topics future appeal.

Thankfully a recent announcement by Santosh Jayaram (Twitter's new VP of Operations) indicated that such considerations are very much part of their plans. By adding link crawling and reputation ranking to their search results, Twitter hope to enter the "real" search space dominated by Google (see Mashable for details).

With their ever growing audience and the attendant risk of spam detailed above the addition of such functionality will certainly help users make sense of Twitter chatter and cannot come quickly enough in my opinion.

UPDATE: Since writing and posting this Kelly_Johnson has become KellyWilliams (in a bid to avoid being barred?) and now only seems to dominate the #Q&A thread. This would seem to indicate that activity on against #Q&A is much lower than the other top topics.