Is Twitter creating the playground for the spammers?

First of all hats off and a huge thanx to Sam Diaz for sharing this important and interesting post with us. Are you guys familiar with Twitter the ever popular microblogging network. If the answer is yes, then you might also be aware of the url shortening services. Yes, Yes I am talking about the tinyurl and bit.ly. With twitter’s upper limit for the message to not exceed 140 characters, we are quite dependent on this service. Through these url shorteners, users mask their links into a shorter one and share their favorite articles, news and other stuff.

Well, Spammers seem to have realized the significant role these URL shortening services can perform in carrying out their nasty spamming plans.  According to MessageLabs ( a division of Symantec), the use and presence of short urls in spam messages has taken a significant rise since the last few days. Now it appears in 2 percent of all the spam messages.

The company informs that these URL shortening services are allowing spammers to go past anti spam tools that keep an eye on all the web domains known for sending spam. As one can guess, these services allows spammers to trick the users into clicking on false links.

Now take this thing with respect to Twitter, you never know when you are clicking on a healthy or disastrous link, and to be honest, when using Twitter, we are least bothered.

If more and more spammers start using the URL shortening services for their evil purposes, the significance of Twitter will disappear very quickly.

Twitter has got to do something about it, otherwise its own existence comes into jeopardy. May be Twitter should increase the allowed message length permitting us to post the original link in its original length and format and eliminate the need to use URL shortening services. What is your opinion in this regard. Do share with us. Thnx in advance.

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