Twitter Trends: Broken Beyond Belief

Ever since the "trending topics" info for Twitter was moved from an obscure search page to front-and-center on everybody's Twitter homepage, I knew trends would be in the toilet. They used to be somewhat interesting and useful, since they weren't as easily accessible by the public. Now that they're right out there for every Joe Blow to see whether he wants to or not, the inevitable spamming and gaming of the system has occurred in full force.

Trends are generally just full of crap -- stuff that only teenagers or the AOL crowd would be into. On occasion, something newsworthy pops up in the trends... But then again, I think most things that are "newsworthy" are just fluff to make the mainstream media feel important. Balloon Boy, anyone? Even I got suckered into that one, sad to say.

Today some serious spam actually made it into the trends. Clearly it was a coordinated spamming effort on two fronts, as shown in this screen shot:

(click to enlarge)

Notice the spam posts, mostly from new accounts (as indicated by their "colored bird" avatars). If you look at the list of trends on the right side, the top two trends are spam from this attack.

The funniest part is that the trend that was number one at first was "Make $ From Home." Because it has a $ in it, clicking on the trend actually returned zero results. So even if people were stupid enough to click that trend, they wouldn't see any of the actual spam or the links. Isn't the point of spam to get people to see whatever you're spamming, and to tempt them to click your link?

So basically, the only people who saw the spam posts were people like me, who went out of the way to modify the search to take out the $ symbol. And I'm betting most people who do that are not going to be dumb enough to click the stupid links. I call megafail on that spam attempt.

The other funny thing is the typo in the second trend: "Google Forune." C'mon, folks. If you're going to do a massive, orchestrated spam attack, at least spell your friggin fake product names right. Might trick a handful more noobs that way.

Anyway, I blog about this for a few reasons:

1. This kind of gaming of the system was inevitable. I'm surprised it took this long, really.
2. It's now clear trends are not just inane, sophomoric nonsense; it's clearly not too hard to make them spammy.
3. This gives me yet another excuse to plug my Greasemonkey script for hiding Twitter trends. If you use Firefox or another Greasemonkey-compatible browser, just install that little script. Once you do, that pesky trends sidebar will be banished for good. I know I haven't missed it over the months, and today just gave me yet another reason to keep using it.