Twitter is suing the five most aggressive enablers of spam on their service in an attempt to dramatically reduce the volume of spam on the social network giant’s service which has been plagued with Tweet spam after a number of highly effective software tools were released.

Makers of Twitter spamming software which are listed in the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the San Francisco federal court, include the makers of TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, and TweetBuddy which are all popular tools used by spammers intent on marketing to the Twitter community by whatever means necessary.

Instead of going after the little guys who actually engage in spamming Twitter’s service, they are going after the creators of the spam software in order to stop the problem at the source.

Much like e-mail spam, I don’t expect Twitter’s legal efforts to put a cap on the Tweet spam as there’s simply too much money in spamming the popular social networking service which has helped topple foreign regimes in recent times. Where there’s a will, there’s a way and money certainly offers adequate incentive to those with little regard for a company’s terms of service or the law.

Among the defendants included in Twitter’s lawsuit against what they believe to be the top 5 most prolific Tweet spam enabler are James Lucero and Garland Harris (TweetBuddy), Skootle Corporation (TweetAdder), and JL4 Web Solutions (TweetAttacks). Twitter, in regards to the lawsuit, published a blog post which read:

“With this suit, we’re going straight to the source. By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

The social network giant claims it has allocated and spent roughly $700,000 in attempts to combat spam on their popular service. Spam which was able to rapidly proliferate due to the sophisticated software made available by the five defendants listed in the lawsuit.

As part of their anti-spam efforts, Twitter utilizes URL redirect domains such as http://t.co in order to not only shorten, but also to skim or analyze outbound links in an attempt to prevent hyperlinks to malicious content and malware. While Twitter still outranks Google and Facebook in terms of the amount of spam on their network, they have been working aggressively towards mitigating the efforts of spammers through an array of anti-spam techniques. Michael Hussey – CEO of PeekYou, a company which monitors spam on Twitter – was quoted having said:

“Twitter has gotten a lot better over the last six months. I think they’re more quickly detecting and deleting lots of spam.”

What do you think of Twitter’s recent lawsuit against the creators of the five most popular Tweet spamming tools?

Twitter Spam: Company Sues Major Tweet Spammers is a post from: The Inquisitr