I like Twitter. I don’t post many comments and when I do, they’re not very exciting. But I “get” Twitter, unlike some people.
However, considering its worldwide success, it lacks basic features. Sorry, what I should say, is that they appear to be concentrating their efforts in the wrong direction. I didn’t really want the new “Ajax” drop down menus on the Followers screen. Neither did I want a swish new login screen.
No, what I wanted was not to be bombarded with “followers” trying to entice me with pornography. I would also like to search through the current more popular tags without them being awash with futher porn enticements and general spam.
Twitter has started to do something – it’s using Google’s Safe Browsing API to get rid of links to spyware and other potentially “dangerous” sites. But, even that is a half-arsed attempt as it doesn’t work with shortened URLs – something that the majority of URLs on Twitter are.
Any particular reason why? Most shortening services allow you to expand their URL into the original full length version – why isn’t Twitter feeding this into the Google API? Sucuri provide an excellent online example of this.
And this doesn’t prevent all the follower spam or pornography links i . Surely it can’t be difficult? New people who turn up and follow hundreds, even thousands of others? Users that are regularly being blocked by others? Can’t Twitter flag this to some kind of adminstrator?
Unfortunately, some of the above behaviours are affecting my enjoyment of the platform. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
- although I’m not suggesting these later examples are excluded – I’m sure some people would like to legitamiately exchange them[↩]