There was an interesting comment today from Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare during our panel at ICWSM. SlideShare (long story) has got onto the top trending terms on Twitter. It seems that when that happens, bots take over and start posting using the trending term and the true trend is buried under noise.
Yeah the twitter botspam on trending topics is a big problem. I found on tweetmotif.com their messages sometimes fall into a similarity cluster together so you can look around them sometimes. (but it's far from perfect for a bot detection task; it should be done in a more specialized way. it was an accidental side-effect here)
Posted by: Brendan O'Connor | May 19, 2009 at 11:11 PM
Typical pattern here, a startup launches with community features that are only used by an enthusiastic, loyal, early adopter crowd. When it starts to go mainstream, the larger audience size attracts spammers, and the usefulness of the site drops precipitously.
Posted by: Greg Linden | May 20, 2009 at 10:43 AM