Twitter is trying to battle spam for several different reasons. The obvious reason of course is that no one wants to receive constant streams of spam, even in sms type messages. Twitter is a little different as it hosts millions ‘conversations’ at once, a factor that has lead to numerous outages. Remove the spam and you may reduce activity by 10-25% – maybe more, I doubt less.

Spam has been the curse of internet since mailing lists and bulletin boards. As the title suggests, I doubt there is a social site anywhere that is spam free. Where I do see a problem is in the definition of the word spam. What is spam to you may be acceptable to me and vice-versa. You may block a site because you feel you are being spammed, I may find their activity fine or only bordering on spam.

A general definition for spam could be: sending unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, particularly commercial advertising.

If you were to study that definition closely, we could all be accused of spamming at various times when using social marketing to promote ourselves, products or web sites. We all obviously draw a line somewhere and when someone crosses it we can them as spammers.

I accept there is obvious spam. Those that use robots to leave thousands of useless and meaningless comments on web sites, particularly to unrelated sites – that’s spam. Sending emails after being asked to be removed from the mailing list that is spam. Wanting to tell the world you have a great new post, or even a great new product, where is the line and when does it become spam?

This is one of the issues that every social media site has to deal with. How to determine if someone is spamming, borderline spamming, or just doing a little too much promoting. Every site has spam. Every day I receive spam both in my inbox and through the comments here.

I am certainly glad that I am not the one determining what is and isn’t spam. User flagged options can be used effectively although it is still open to abuse. Digg would be a good example of where a group can decide that anything you submit gets torpedoed straight away. Spam is here and we are probably all guilt of it at some time. However, if social media sites like Twitter can reduce the amount of spam, it would certainly make them more attractive.