Chirpio Attempts To Stop Twitter Spam

Chirpio is a new web service which is aiming to stop the twitter spam problem. The idea behind the service is to allow twitter users to rate the people they follow or just mark them as spam completely. It uses the twitter authorization API to allow access to your account so they are not storing anything on their end except the ratings.

One of the major concerns of course is the ability to game the system by rating up people you like and rating down (or completely marking as spam) the people who well you don’t like as much. The Chirpio developer team have said they are working on an algorithm to make sure that does not become too much of a problem. I would assume the algorithm would be similar to the way Digg pushes up stories to the front page. Then again that isn’t always flawless either – but what truly is?

Chirpio makes it super easy to rate the people you follow and also makes it very easy to unfollow them straight from the Chirpio website.  In addition to just rating the people you’re following you can also tweet directly from the Chirpio website (which is nice).  If you do not want to use the site instead of twitter.com or your favorite twitter client you can simply tweet to Chirpio to let them know about a particular twitter user.  For example, “@chirpio @besttechie +” or “@chirpio @besttechie good” – that would be a positive rating and likewise you can do the same for a negative rating using a “-” or “bad”.  You can even do more than one twitter users at a time.  For example, “@chirpio @besttechie @mand3rz @chrispirillo and @usrbingeek are good tweeters”.

Will this service be effective?  It’s hard to say, but it’s definitely a good idea and something twitter themselves should consider implementing (or at least something like it).  Bottom line is the spam has to go.