Twitter spambots, LinkedIn’s phony friends & Skype smut

Are we being sold down the river by some of the social networks that we are placing some degree of trust in as we use them for business purposes? I only ask because I had a delightfully polite email from a certain Hayley Pinkerfield who is deputy features editor of Media Week after LinkedIn suggested that we’d recently viewed each other’s details.

Hayley shares my healthy distrust for this service’s trustworthiness when it comes to who is trying to link to who. After all, twice this last month LinkedIn suggested that I might like to connect with Adrian Bridgwater. Yeah, right.

Twitter hasn’t been much better recently has it? Take a woman’s name, add a number to it to differentiate it (and allow the spurious creation of an infinite number of variants) and then pump it out to every male member from Croydon to Nantucket. It’s just getting tiresome isn’t it? Hotmail and Gmail seem to (largely) be able to catch super-obvious spam. Why can’t Twitter?

Yahoo Instant Messenger and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger have also left the door open in several instances it seems.

I’ll also just mention Skype as this is smutty porn-related spam at its most invasive. Yes I know I could go ex-directory, but I am quite new to the service and finding it very useful to network with new clients. Plus, I’ve got nothing to hide so why do I care? Well, I do care when I get personal messaging asking if I ‘remembered last night’ etc.

CNET’s Matt Asay has been talking about this topic since this time last year and most recently questioned, “Is there not enough corporate dollars in instant messaging to justify worrying about spam? Today, probably not, but that will likely change. Oracle, IBM, and others seem to think there's lots of money in collaboration tools.”

One almost has to step back at this point and say, if (and most certainly when) the next generation of application developers produces a new killer social networking application – will they be building it from a user experience perspective primarily (I hazard a guess at yes indeed), or will they be taking a long term enterprise style view of the web app construction process?

It’s almost like if we were just talking about email here, would the application have been built with anti-spam technology at the edge of the network near the mail servers, the kind of thing that you’d expect F5 Networks to talk about I guess.

I know that a degree of this kind of web malware will always circulate and that the providers of these web services are assiduously working to try and improve the sanctity of their portals. But I just feel a bubbling over effect right now. Maybe I spent too much time online over the bank holiday.