Seems I’m not the only one suddenly deluged with Twitter spam (20 attempted followers in 48 hrs - which is 18 more than the rest of the time I’ve been on Twitter). Twitter says:

However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers and we don’t want to see our avatar on their profile page.

Those who have created thousands of accounts, posted thousands of the same link, or aggressively followed way too many people, stand out like a sore thumb to our support team because they are usually blocked by hundreds or thousands of well behaved Twitter users. This simple feedback is one of the ways we detect and delete spam accounts but there are also preventative measures and more we could be doing.

They continue:

To combat aggressive following directly we have recently imposed new limits on following—spammy accounts following too many users have been drastically curbed. Those that existed prior to this new limit await review. Our administrative tools for finding and dealing with spam grow more sophisticated as we learn more.

Twitter has enough problems — like what’s the revenue model? the periodic service disruptions suggest they’re having scaling issues, some of which could be cash-related — without the Invasion of the Spammers, but it was an inevitable deveopment for a social appliance that may turn out to be a victim of its own success.

But I think the first comment on this entry in Twitter’s in-house blog is indicative of their best asset:

I offer my help. Seriously.

You can’t buy the goodwill earned by creating something people love. I don’t know what the answer is, but part of it will certainly be Twitter fans hanging in there.

UPDATE: Obviously I got one rather significant fact wrong - or at least omitted (due to nothing more clever than vapour lock of the head) the news of Twitter’s June funding round including the involvement of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. But the bigger question, which will inevitably hit them as a business, is Twitter’s revenue model - or rather lack thereof. This isn’t 1999. Twitter succeeded in the Web 2.0 way of having seemingly miniscule overheads at first. But the scaling issue means we may be reminded of the scary dotcom term “burn rate” again. Where’s the money gonna come from?