A good day for Twitter, IMHO

I saw a couple of tweets yesterday afternoon of people speculating that Twitter was purging spam accounts, then noticed the "Twitter Correcting" and "Spammers Perish" trending topics this morning. This is a great thing for Twitter, in my opinion.

Since we advocate to our clients that they leverage Twitter as a channel to reach their buying communities and key influencers directly, which in some cases has generated sales leads, I've been increasingly disturbed by the steady increase in spam and a lack of action on the part of Twitter to fix it. 

It wasn't a surprise, as Twitter is decidedly part of our mainstream culture this year. The spam parade on Twitter simply was following the same path as it did with blogging 3-4 years ago and e-mail before that.  Until now, Twitter has been too lax in addressing it. I applaud them for this action, but would like to see them go farther by allowing more options for users to filter out spam through account settings. For example, I'd love to be able to automatically block any account trying to follow me that has an "x" in its handle.

In any event, I hope that this allows companies and individuals to build a high-quality following on Twitter that brings the kinds of business benefits that we believe exists. Personally, I look forward to seeing less follower notices that look like this:

Followers: 76
Following: 2,375
Updates: 0