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What it’s like to sign up for Twitter in 2012?

I just signed up for a twitter account that I am going to use for giving bits of Buddhist wisdom for coders. The twitter account is @BuddhaCoder.

2007 was the year that Twitter made a huge splash at SxSW. It was the year that Facebook threw an awesome party.

I thought Twitter was so cool when when Karina Longworth followed me. Here’s a smart, geeky, beautiful film critic following me on Twitter and it was so awesome to meet her at that SxSW in 2007.

It’s now 2012. I’m in LA moving out of my apartment. I’ve wondered about how life was feeling stale. Where could I find and give inspiration? I created BuddhaCoder on Twitter, and when you sign up for Twitter this is what happens:

1. Sign-up is optimized with just name, email and password.
2. You are asked to follow a bunch of celebrities in different categories.
3. You are asked to have Twitter search through your contacts to find friends, but we know what that really means. *cough* Path

Once this is all done you see the tweets of folks you’ve followed.

Who follows you back or @ replies you?

Spammers.

The magic of meeting a Karina is gone.

Here is how I’d fix it:
1. Create Twitter ambassadors who reach out to folks as they join. Someone like Calvin Lee (@mayhemstudios) would be great for this, or Sarah Austin of @pop17. 3000 or so ambassadors that get special badges would be more than enough to handle the onslaught of 300k new users per day.

2. Pool anything spammy into a job queue for approval if it is directed at a new user. This will require something extensive in the Natural Language Processing realm that Jacob Perkins of Stream Hacker would know about.

2 replies on “What it’s like to sign up for Twitter in 2012?”

Yes, I’m very surprised at how poor twitter’s spam detection is. They have real users reporting spam accounts, so they should have plenty of labeled data to use for classifying spammers.

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