According to Robert X. Cringeley, long time computer industry pundit, Twitter is dead. Why?
"Twitter is dead because it is now so popular that the spammers and the scammers have arrived in force. And history tells us that once they sink their teeth into something, they do not let go. Ever.
Twitter scams aren't new. But I've never seen so many hit in a single week or with such rigorous precision."
Symantec has a nice blog post about one of the underlying problems with Twitter, i.e. since Twitter is limited to 140 characters, people use "URL shorteners" instead of the actual URLs to which they are referring. Therefore you have no idea where you are going when you click on the shortened URL.
Cringely closes with this:
Spam will kill Twitter's usefulness for everyone but relentless Internet marketers, unless the brainiacs at TwitCentral can figure out a better way to block it. Smart people have tried and failed everywhere else, though. I don't hold out much hope.
My view is that just as with any new technology, if there are real benefits people will tolerate the risks for some period of time and third parties will develop solutions to mitigate the risks. This is the history of the whole IT security industry.
Take email for example. Email has been so valuable that people tolerated spam for some time. Then third parties developed anti-spam solutions for which enterprises were willing to pay and consumers got as a feature of either their email client or anti-malware product.
On the other hand, there is still a huge amount of email spam, which means that email spamming is still profitable. Therefore there are tons of people who either are not availing themselves of anti-spam filters or for some reason still fall for spam scams.
Yet with all that spam, there is no sign of email dying due its immense value.
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