Tommy Collison

Since there’s a lot of spamming going on concerning #moonfruit, which is something I really don’t care all that much about, I began thinking of ways of getting around it.

Now, I’m someone with no programming experience. I’ve got the API extension cheat working, but that was only when I used desktop clients that, and got annoyed at running out of API requests every hour, but that doesn’t mean I can actually turn any of my pipe dreams into any sort of a reality.

The basic idea that I have is to help people such as myself who don’t care for some of the hashtags (#) that Twitter users throw out.

As an example, whenever there’s a Lion’s game on, or any sort of sporting event, I usually end up having to unfollow people who talk a whole lot about it, because, at the end of the day, I really don’t care.

So, you know the way Twitter only shows you the @replies of people you follow? In Twitter’s own words, you have to follow both the sender of the tweet and also the ‘recipient’ of the tweet for it to appear in your stream.

This is the same.

If you somehow could choose to ‘unfollow’ a certain hashtag, so that it just wouldn’t appear in your stream, then there’d be no need for any unfollowing or any of that nonsense.

Having said that, Twitter does provide something really unique when it comes to these sort of events, sports, elections, Michael Jackson dying, et cetera, so I’m not suggesting anything drastic by removing them or anything.

In fact, I think they’ve taken a huge step in the right direction by making all hashtags into links, as you can see from the pictures.

I think that a subscription service of sorts could work out well. Forget your Sky+ TV service, I’m only talking about a checklist so my stream isn’t blocked up with #lions tweets.

On the subject of hashtags, I’d just like to say how funny I find it when spambots advertise themselves, and add some random trending topics into their tweet, so they gain more attention, and then people (fans of Jackson are the people I’ve seen doing it most) @reply them, incensed at the idea of someone using Jackson to get their spam more attention.

Eh, people, they’re robots…