The Best Practices section contains specific guidelines about Twitter Spam:

Don’t spam people. Twitter’s following model means that you have to respect the interests and desires of other people here or they’ll unfollow you. The most common way to run afoul of that understanding—and to thus look like a spammer—is to send unsolicited @messages or DMs, particularly when you include a promotional link.

Of course, if you run an account that focuses explicitly on sharing exclusive coupon codes or sale information, you’re probably just fine posting promos. But tread carefully, and consider explaining in your bio or background how the account works.

Luckily, even the Twitter technology has moved on; trying to be a ‘Spam Free Zone’.  Masterminds of Internet and Social Marketing – including Orangeleads, I-Net, Digg, Facebook, etc said: “Marketing is ok – spamming is wrong!” “Marketing Gurus”  have agreed that it is not in their interest to send, duplicate, re-tweet or even twitter useless messages which actually only damages reputation and confidence in their potential customer base. That’s new, too.

If new, there are a few a tips: Test the waters by sending just a few promos to start, and then continuing only if people show interest.

To make sure you’re not spamming folks, we also suggest you avoid the following:

• Posting duplicate updates to an account: Posting the same update over and over throughout the day is considered spammy and a possible violation of our terms of service.

• Cross-posting duplicate updates to multiple accounts: If you post the same update to multiple accounts, you could violate our terms of service.

• Following churn: Following and unfollowing the same people repeatedly, as well as following and unfollowing those who don’t follow back, are both violations of our terms of service.

Some people are sceptical about Twitter 101.  Robert Scoble posted this comment on TechCrunch:

I thought that Twitter was so simple that it doesn’t need an instruction manual. Is this why twitter is going to beat Facebook

We rather do what Apple is doing: Focus on featuring the best uses of Twitter (in a directory/store) and stop with trying to make a guide. Is there a guide like this for the iPhone? No.

Twitter has a control problem: They seem to want to reward people for certain behaviours (ala the Suggested User List, which has mostly brands and celebrities on it) while trying to get the rest of us to “behave” and “Twitter properly.” That isn’t the attitude of a mature platform.

“Oh and why aren’t they fixing search instead of doing this lame stuff? Search isn’t indexing old tweets and is full of spam and noise. Fix that stuff and businesses will figure out the model on their own. Look at TwitFilter!”

We are less sceptical.  Some businesses don’t get Twitter right away and we are in favour of any efforts that point businesses in the right direction.

But, as said before – new technology kids are around. TwitFilter is definitely the way forward. Eliminating all sorts of nonsense on our phone, Laptop or Netbook – TwitFilter is bringing it almost to the level of “text message” from people you know. Very impressive and highly recommended. Considering that the same technology has already been integrated into the Google Wave module, we might have a “win-win” situation  – that is – if you are not a spammer.

Comments welcome. @why_tweat

Having said that, the same .img file is available for  weeks from various on-line sources – even here at whytwitter. Just without a “modification” linking to a specific website.

Diet Chromium OS is one of many Chromium OS builds that have cropped up since Google revealed more Chrome OS details last month.

Many of the builds thus far have been targeted at specific hardware configurations, such as one made available by a Dell employee designed for Dell’s Mini 10V netbook. However, not all builds follow the same path. The Diet Chromium build has a smaller footprint, but promises wider hardware support. Having looked under the bonnet, it is exactly the same file structure as found in specialized forums such as whytwitter.

Conclusion:

Most of the WiFi configurations are flakey and it is far too early to release any versions into the public. As far as we are concerend, it looks more like a publicity stunt.

We used Tweety in the Google Wave sandbox preview and it works just fine. Perfect for all you new Google Wave users. If you need a manual, you can find it on our site, whytwitter.

So let’s do it, with pictures.

Go to your contacts window and click the + sign at the bottom to add a new contact:

Enter this address:

tweety-wave@appspot.com

Now make a new wave. Click the + symbol to add a new participant to it. Add Tweety:

Next you’ll get an authenticating message:

A new window will open to connect Wave to your Twitter account:

After you sign in successfully, you’ll get a message confirming this, and then the window will close.

Back in your wave, push the “Done” button if you’re still seeing the authentication message. Then you will see this:

Enter your tweet into the top box (first arrow in the screenshot) and push update to send. Keep in mind that it won’t count down the 140 characters. If you go over 140 characters, Google Wave won’t warn you.

Below the tweet box, you’ll see tweets from others (second, lower arrow in the screenshot). You might try reloading the page, if it looks like the names of those tweeting aren’t showing up correctly.

Happy tweeting within Google Wave. Comments welcome and please re-tweet at @why_tweat

Please bookmark our site here, we are sure you want to know about the new TwitFilter when it becomes available.

The rapidly growing social network, which lets you communicate in 140-character “tweets” to others who “follow” your every move, has been infiltrated by an influx of unsolicited advertising.

But to some, there’s a big difference between legitimate firms using Twitter as a helpful marketing tool, and the fly-by-night onslaught of messages that promise to enlarge breasts or other body parts.

Twitter’s own half-hearted attempt to control the spam has had little effect. Third-party Twitter clients are racing to come up with better solutions, but as businesses rush to use Twitter, some experts warn that the worst is yet to come.

Having said that, whytwitter™, or @why_tweat is announcing a Spam Filter for Twitter on the 20^th November 2009. Having 30 Mill+ users at hand, it seems a variable proposition.

There are others. Technically, says Paul Granger, Marketing Manger of the Web-based third-party Twitter interface whytwitter™, what we’re now seeing is really Twitter spam 2.0.

“The first iteration of Twitter spam was a tweet that showed up with a picture of a pretty girl on it,” he said. “You looked at it and realized you just got spammed.”

Granger also points out that that was a hugely inefficient way to send spam. It required a lot of manual work for the sender and was fairly easy to block, which is exactly what happened when early Twitter adopters began reporting the problem back to Twitter’s home base in San Francisco.

The second phase of Twitter spam, which we’re seeing today, is a lot harder to identify, and thus a lot harder to protect against.

By using computers to hunt for keywords and replying to “relevant” usernames, spammers are dumping their Tweets into your “timelines” — recent Twitter posts by yourself and everyone you’re following.

The number of such unwanted tweets is rising. What was once maybe one or two messages a day has now risen to around 10 percent of everything that’s showing up.

The problem with Twitter spam, as opposed to, say, MySpace spam, is how personal it can be.

Granger tells a story about a couple of friends at a baseball game who were sitting in separate sections. They used Twitter to figure out where to go for pizza afterward.

“One guy wanted to go to one place. The other was lobbying for a different restaurant when a Tweet showed up suggesting they try a third option,” said Granger. “The sender of this Tweet was the owner of this third option. He promised these guys a 10 percent discount if they came by his restaurant.

“The guys went there instead and had a great time. So is this spam — or effective marketing?”

Granger’s opinion is that spam is any message he doesn’t want to read.

“I may get more value out of Twitter than anyone else on the planet because I use Twitter as a tool — specifically as a marketing tool,” Kawasaki blogged back in December.

“If the concept of using Twitter in a commercial manner interests you, keep reading,” he wrote. “If it doesn’t, then you can continue to send and receive tweets about how cats are rolling over and the line at Starbucks.”

Kawasaki’s message, which he promotes often, is starting to sink in — which could have very wide-ranging effects.

Currently, if you write a Tweet asking for airline suggestions, you might be “followed” by JetBlue or Southwest, both of whom make good use of the network.

But as more businesses adopt this practice, forcing their competitors to jump in as well, you may start seeing every airline around clogging up your inbox with 140-character ads for cheap tickets.

Granger, whose whytwitter™ is one of a number of third-party Twitter interfaces, counters spammers and marketers by applying a scoring system completely personalized to a user’s circle of friends.

That makes it much harder for spammers to break into your network.

“Twitter is only as vulnerable as the network you create,” says Granger. “If you’re using the site as it was originally intended — as a way to stay in touch with close friends and family — then this is the perfect filter.”

But if you’re a power user, following hundreds of Twitterers throughout the day, then WhyTwitter isn’t going to work for your needs.

To this end, Loic Le Meur, whose company owns the third-party Twitter client Twhirl and “Twitter of video” Seesmic, is now adding a “report as spam” button to Twhirl.

That’s a major improvement on how Twitter currently handles spam, which entails sending a direct message to “@spam,” an extra step most people wouldn’t bother to take.

Twhirl’s “report as spam” button automates and simplifies that process. If enough people click it to report a sender as a spammer, then the folks at Twitter headquarters can quickly block him.

Twhirl’s button won’t free you from spam completely, which whytwitter™ more general filter almost does.

But it’s much more acceptable to corporate Twitter users, such as Dell and Comcast, who have been using the service to communicate with customers and who wouldn’t want to be blocked by a general filter.

(Le Meur says if you want to see how much attention they’re really paying, try writing “Dell Sucks” in a tweet and seeing how long it takes them to respond).

Le Meur is sympathetic to such business users, since his own Seesmic Desktop gets about one tweet a minute from potential customers.

Granger is too — to an extent. And he emphasizes that in such a new medium, the users will get to decide.

“People need to make up their mind about questions of free speech, personal space and unwanted marketing,” he says.

He points out that until the general public reaches a decision on what qualifies as spam and what doesn’t — and starts to legislate tougher laws for offenders — it doesn’t matter what new networking system shows up.

“Until the stick surpasses the carrot,” says Granger, “we’re going to be fighting this fight.”

Stay tweat @why_tweat

The world is crying out for a sophisticated TWITTER SPAM application which works on PDAs, PCs and MACs being integrated into all common add-on applications available. Available by invitation only, WhyTwitter will announce details on the 20^th November 2009. Follow here: @why_tweat

Loic Le Meur has proposed to add a “report as spam” button to the Twitter desktop clients his company has created, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. This button would flag the spammer to Twitter (or to a separate database of users) and Seesmic or Twhirl could then exclude the spammer from its client apps after a sufficient number of users report them as spam. Le Meur also says that the clients would manually check the potential spammers to ensure that they are actually spammers.

After the clients are established as spammers, Twitter could then delete or block the user accounts. Le Meur says that his Twitter clients will soon include a “report as spam” button and is calling on fellow popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck and Tweetie, to follow suit. The one potential issue with the flag button, says Le Meur, is that Twitter prefers spam to be reported by a direct message to its spam account “@spam.” But you need have @spam to follow you first (it seems to be autofollowing) before hitting the flag button on a Twitter client. It’s an extra step the user would have to take to make the button usable, says Le Meur.

WhyTwitter is taking a different approach, using latest technology, AJAX implementation and a direct link to Twitter themselves. Initial tests have shown that the application can cope with 30 Mill+ users on a “Exact Match”, “And – Or” definition giving users or twitters maximum flexibility to automatically delete unwanted tweats.

Having said that, there are a few Twitter applications that let you flag possible spam, but none are tied to the Twitter desktop clients, like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetie. Topify, a nifty service we reviewed recently, gives you a more comprehensive version of the standard New Follower email offered by Twitter, by providing the user’s Bio, Follower/Following numbers, the user’s most recent tweets and the ability to block and unfollow potential spammers directly from the New Follower email. Twerp Scan scans through your followers and flags Twitter users who could be potential spammers. You can control the filtering options that determine who is a spammer (i.e. number of followers vs. following). But Twitter may have to develop or license its own spam blocking software if the problem becomes more prevalent.

Flagging is a good idea and a great first step to battling spam but what Twitter really needs is an Akismet -like plug-in. Akismet, created by Wordpress developers, filters link spam from blog comments and trackback pings for blogs. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to a blog site, it is submitted to Akismet, which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down on whether it is spam. Akismet says that its plug-in has caught 10.7 billion spam comments from blogs since its launch in 2005.

Bottom line, the world is crying out for a sophisticated TWITTER SPAM application which works on PDAs, PCs and MACs being integrated into all common add-on applications available. Available by invitation only, WhyTwitter will announce details on the 20^th November 2009.