With Innovation comes headaches
I usually reserve my rants for twitter, but I found this situation pretty interesting. Not everyone, but a good portion of people use twitter now. Through the huge popularity of twitter escalated short urls. Okay, to my situation.
I saw the movie “The Hangover” last night, and it was so funny….I will probably see it 3 times before it comes to DVD. Since I live my life in constant movie quotes I posted one of the quotes to twitter, “Tigers love pepper…..They hate cinnamon”. No big deal, but then I received a reply from someone who I do not follow and this person does not follow me. I check the twitter profile, as I always do, and it seems it is a spam account. They are advertising some url using a short url, lucky for me I have a short url expander plugin for Firefox. Their url is http://****vegastrips.com/thehangover.
Lets breakdown what they are doing. Not only are they utilizing short urls to make it difficult for you to see their url, but they are adding “thehangover” to the end of their url. This will get them brownie points with google. They, spammers/scammers, are now utilizing twitter, short urls and SEO to beat people down for their scam.
With innovation comes mores headaches.
And with sites increasing in popularity such as Twitter has, come the waves of spammers. I detest bots, if you promote your site, do it yourself, don’t automate it, so impersonal, haha… But I feel that most everyone should “expect” to see spam in one form or another if you are a member of and frequent social networking sites.