Hackers, here's an idea for your next startup.
So you think you can hack? As an entreprenuer/hacker, I constantly have a dozen of startup ideas in my mind and since I'm working on my current startup, an iPhone Mobile Gaming Studio, plus I have an immediate itch that I need some scratching, why not give this idea out to some follow hackers out there to figure it out and hey if you made it, send me a Thank you card or a special tribute page on your site works too.
So what is the this idea you have, you might ask. Whenever a service gets popular enough, you'll see spammers trying to exploit the service. Twitter is definitely exploding like crazy now and Twitter definitely has their own set of problems (hint: whales) keeping their developers buzy. The last time I was at their Twitter API meetup, if I did not hear wrongly, they actually have people dedicated for fishing out the spammers. Seriously, their "in-house" solution will not scale given the increasing amount of spammers that I saw on my followers list just this week.
So you think you have hacker's chop to take a swing at this problem? Go for it and I can guarantee that you will definitely be on the radar of @ev and @biz. If you can come out with a decent solution, not perfect, you should have a million dollar acquisition in the works. Twitter has shown that they will go out and buy startups that add value to the Twitter ecosystem. For example, summize. They're got Twitter into the world of real time search.
There are existing solutions for fighting spam on Twitter, such as follow verification or even the Block button on your twitter home page, but that is way too many steps for lazy Twitter users like me. With the openness of Twitter's API, I think it's possible to come up with a decent spam user detection. So there you go, start hacking away. I have some ideas of my own on how spam detection could work for Twitter, so if you're interested in a discussion, follow me and DM me. @khangtoh
