As Nambu gets closer to finishing its private beta with a new 2.0 re-release in late February, I will be releasing a series of articles here over the next month or so highlighting some real concerns that I have for the future of micro-blogging as it exists today on Twitter: 1) the never-ending fail whales; 2) a permanently lame new user experience and stagnant acqusition of new users; 3) Twitter’s open endorsement of selected members of its ecosystem; and 4) spam. For today, it is spam.

Twitter is about sharing thoughts, pictures, links, personal happenings and ideas in a new cool way with random people. But that Twitter is now evolving into a voluntary spam network, a cheap social-networked version of the Home Shopping Network, where all of us will be forced to choose between using Twitter and consuming spam, or ignoring Twitter altogether.

Let’s start at the beginning. I define Twitter spam loosely: anything that is an unsolicited offer from anyone to buy something. It is an interruption, pointless noise, and offensive, just as it is in email.

With email, though, I don’t have any relationship with the people sending me spam. They don’t also send me regular emails that I want to read and possibly respond to. Because of that, very effective systems have evolved to hide email spam automatically based on a simple concept: forever block them and/or any matching message content. And so we almost never see email spam anymore.

With Twitter this problem is much more insidious since you can’t follow Twitter as an aggregate stream without consuming its spam. This is best illustrated with an example. Take, as that example, recent tweets from Chris Messina, a technologist at Google that I have never met, but know of and respect from afar. He has about 20,000 followers or so, a huge number for the vast majority. Mr. Messina would normally tweet about cool industry stuff that is important for me to learn of and keep tabs on. But now he also tweets ads, such as this, or this. He spams me.

So there is the problem. I simply can’t follow Chris Messina anymore because I won’t accept the implicit agreement to consume his spam in exchange for receiving the desired technology-related or personal tweets. As I write this I have officially unfollowed Chris Messina, been forced to do so, but only to not see spam. I want to follow him, now can’t, and Twitter’s overall value to me has decreased.

Sadly, the impact does not end there. Because of the way Twitter implemented Lists, combined with the lack of a proper user-blocking implementation, his spam appears within almost any significant Twitter List that others have created to follow the Internet technology industry. A majority of the the Lists that I am interested in following are infected with his spam, or from others doing the same thing. They ruin Lists. Twitter further enables spammers to reach us, and provides us no reasonable and portable mechanism to silence them (perhaps intentionally). The more followers these spammers have the more Lists they are added to.

But the much larger question that concerns me as a product developer currently focusing on social messaging is this: if I am on Twitter, in the Internet industry, and can’t follow fellow technologists like Chris Messina because they spam me, what is the point of being on Twitter at all?

I see inherent, personally endorsed spam as the single largest problem facing Twitter today, looming very ominously on the horizon.

Services like Ad.ly (aka Spamly) and Sponsored Tweets are openly and without shame eroding the integrity of the network completely, with no suggestion that Twitter is concerned whatsoever. Ad.ly openly brags that they “connect top-tier twitterers with top tier brands,” code for people with lots of followers getting together to spam the other 99.5% of Twitter, people without significant follower counts. But for every user they seduce into their spam network they inversely reduce the value of Twitter as a whole, just as Chris Messina has done.

Ad.ly (and its kind) destroys the reasoning behind why we follow each other entirely. If someone I follow spams me, then they don’t really value their (however small) connection to me at all, beyond the revenue they can generate from it. They don’t really value Twitter for what it is supposed to be. They just don’t care. A relative handful of people with the most followers are trending toward compromising the usefulness of the entire network for everyone.

Rationing the number of spam tweets is an attempt to just rationalize spamming. Perhaps I am overstating it? One or two spams every day from even 10-15% of the people I follow will completely destroy the real-time Twitter stream. I will no longer trust a single tweet. I will need to check each one, and ask myself if it is a spam, or actual content. At least in a magazine or newspaper I am able to visually separate ads from content quite easily, but on Twitter I will have to mentally process each item to determine which are real and which are spam. At that point the stream is truly worthless.

Project out another 12-24 months as others follow Mr. Messina’s example. If nothing is done Twitter will be well on its way to officially becoming little more than a voluntary spam network where you can choose to consume spam, or simply not use it.

At Nambu, after we exit private beta in late February with our 2.0 re-release, we will be following up with a steady stream of new features to try and combat this problem, and others related to it. Stay tuned.

I am posting this on the Nambu blog because I feel that this problem threatens Nambu as an improving social messaging client. It threatens all Twitter clients and the entire Twitter ecosystem, but only the mothership can save us. I hope she does, but I see no evidence that within Twitter this is seen as a problem. My intention here is to stoke a wider conversation on this issue. Hopefully others with larger followings and better connections can effect some change in policy and strategy within the platform (as Twitter tends to just ignore me). Without change at the center, I currently don’t see how this problem ever gets solved before it is too late.

All feedback is welcome. You can follow Nambu at @nambucom and me, Eric Woodward, at @ejwc.

My apologies to Chris Messina. I am not interested in highlighting him on purpose. He just happened to recently start tweeting spam, and is someone that I want to follow but can’t anymore because he spams us.