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.

MTV to reinvent TRL - now with added Twitter

MTV have just announced that they are to attempt to breathe life into the phone-in format (TRL was cancelled late last year) by partnering with Twitter & Facebook in a new show due to air in the summer. Interestingly (perhaps) the show will be presented by our very own Alexa Chung.

By being "Powered by" Twitter / Facebook the scope for the audience to feel like a central part of the show certainly increases. With live performances etc planned there should be plenty to get people tweeting - we know that these social platforms often work best when triggered by a broadcast event (Susan Boyle anyone?).

This approach is not without its problems however. The Telegraph recently had a spot of bother with their hosting of a live Twitter feed on their budget coverage homepage (Guardian coverage here). The feed was eventually taken down but not before some rather choice tweets made it through.

Furthermore, there is some debate about who is using Twitter. A good summary by Nick Burcher shows that is really depends on where you look. Quantcast figures show that younger demos dominate, while Nielsen data suggests the userbase is rather older. Will this mechanic therefore connect with MTVs core audience as well as they hope? Perhaps there is more in the partnership for Twitter & Facebook.

More on this: Media Guardian, TechCrunch