If you now attempt to tweet the same exact thing twice, Twitter will block you from doing so.
This move comes just days after Twitter moved to make it simpler for users to report spam users that were polluting Twitter. This move is in the same vein, spam users have long repeated the same tweet over and over again, often abusing hashtags to show up in searches for those tags, just to promote their links.
Of course, the move is not without complications. Given that TheNextWeb has a global readership, we might repeat a tweet to catch readers on different continents. Of course, it is simple to break Twitters move by merely altering a single character in the tweet. Doing so removes the block on that tweet, and releases it to the world. This is an effective compromise, forcing bots to constantly adapt their tweets, which is simple for a user looking to post a link every eight hours, but difficult for a bot on a thousand accounts on multiple topics.
All these moves by Twitter seem to represent a full campaign to combat the spam that has threatened Twitter over time. As Twitter has grown, so has the target on its back. Any system that is as open and simple as Twitter is going to be exploited. Twitter is taking the smart route: put blocks in the way of the simple machine created spam, and give the real users the tools needed to combat the more pernicious spammers.
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What is up next? Perhaps Twitter will place warning labels on users that follow several hundred people at random when they create their account. The hallmark of any Spam account is a following/follower ratio in the hundreds. What I never understood is why the spammers do not have their spam accounts follow one another to give them the flair of authenticity.
Everyone should give Twitter a polite golf clap for starting to clean up their backyard.
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