Barack Obama’s Favourite Dating Site*

*and other reasons why Twitter may lose its lustre.

An experience in Twitter Squatting the other night has got me to looking at some of the perils and pitfalls of Twitter as it currently stands and I have come to the conclusion that unless Twitter addresses some pretty important issues, it runs the risk of plateauing, being superseded or perhaps even a decline.

My main problem with Twitter is to do with trust – and both readers will know that I hold the establishment and maintenance of trust as a core tenet of digital success. If your community (customers / users / other stakeholders) do not trust what you provide, then eventually they will seek an alternative or otherwise break their relationship with you. It is a funny thing that, how people will behave like … well…. people.

As a case in point, I started looking at the Twitter pages of some high profile people and found some disturbing things;

1). Barack Obama apparently likes to follow dating sites offering ”like minded adults looking for a fling with no strings attached”

Barrack Obama's Twitter Page

2). His Holiness The Dalai Lama apparently follows adult dating sites, promotes pyramid scams in motivational speaking and online ad sales, wants you to buy a Taser and has a favourite online gambling site.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Now, obviously neither of these things is true – but it highlights the challenges that Twitter faces if it intends to keep its credibility. If Twitter becomes a cesspool of spam, then it will face a decay of trust and the consequences that brings.

At play here are a couple of the core features of Twitter which give the spammers and scammers free reign; the compressed URL and “auto following.” The compressed URL uses tools such as Tiny URL and Bit.ly to take long internet addresses and compress them into a dozen or so characters – very important when you are trying to share your brilliance in 140 Characters or less. Unfortunately, this technique also masks the ultimate destination for any link sent through Twitter – so uses click on links without knowing where they are going. A Spammers dream!

Auto following means that you will appear as following anyone who follows you, and it appears that the spammers and scammers have found a way to make this possible through the Twitter API(I can’t find an option in Account Settings). There appears to be a lucrative business in following a high profile person and then having your (fake) profile appear on their Twitter page. This attacks one of the fundamental attractions of Twitter – that the social networking aspects of the platform encourage users to visit other followers of the people they are following, and thus create new connections. If there are more fake Twitter pages than real ones, then the users’ patience will be tested.

 At the most fundamental level, all of this boils down to the credibility of the base identity behind each Twitter profile. At the moment, I can create a Twitter profile for any available combination of ASCII Characters, whether I have any entitlement to use that profile or not. I do not need to verify my rights to use that title, nor do I need to create any link to a real identity. I can apparently say or do anything with impunity.

 There is, of course an answer to this, and that is for Twitter to implement stronger identity management. By requiring an association with a credible identity record for all Twitter accounts, Twitter can start to restore some credibility for their platform. There are lots of options, starting with OpenID and moving through a range of proprietary or government driven alternatives. If people were making legitimate use of the Twitter platform, then there shouldn’t be any resistance.

Update: Twitter is also facing some technical issues, apparently caused by design flaws, the way it handles @replies and other technical problems. Add unpredictable performance to the mix and Twitter could end up being a victim of its own success if a more reliable alternative comes along. Good coverage from TechCrunch here, here, here and here and from Paris Lemon here.