Brant,Thank you for your concern. This is something that bothers us as well.
Moving applications exclusively to OAuth-based authentication will certainly help in restricting applications that abuse the service. If you find a service that you think is violating our TOS, please email a...@twitter.com or send a message to @twitterapi and we can take a look. As you mentioned, Del is great but she is but one person. We do have an abuse team forming to help quickly identify which services are violating our TOS. All in all we have a lot of work to do so please do help where you can. Cheers, Doug On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Brant <btedes...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This message will hopefully get back to the people who run Twitter API > development and spam prevention. > > I noticed there are quite a few twitter applications that are > developed to abuse the service and violate their TOS. They do not > hide what their purpose is, yet these applications remain active. I > contacted twitter.com/delbius who heads Twitter Spam prevention and > she said that they do revoke API access to abusive applications. But > I don't think they are taking an aggressive stance against them. > > Abusive Applications: > http://www.huitter.com/mutuality/ > http://www.twollo.com/ > > The combination of these two applications is for outright abuse of the > service. They have been around for several months and are known > applications to abuse the service with. To make matters worse, > Twitter suspends accounts of the people who use these applications > rather than targeting the root of the problem, the applications > themselves. (Sound counterproductive? RIAA uses a similar policy by > going after end users.) > > I propose that applications need to be more closely scrutinized and > can even be flagged as abusive by users. Instead of creating > algorithms that detect abnormal user behavior, why not detect abnormal > application behavior. > > Taking a stronger stance against gray area applications could reduce > server load on Twitter (giving real applications faster response time) > and reduce manpower to deal with spam prevention. > > I strongly encourage anyone who develops Twitter applications to send > this link around. > > Thanks for reading, > Brant > twitter.com/BrantTedeschi >
