I’m currently following 39 people and being followed by 67. Of those 67 people, I would venture to say at LEAST 20 of them are full fledge spam accounts. I get at least one or two random spam accounts per week following me lately. I guess the trick there is, they hope you are a Twitter zombie and just follow back everyone who follows you. I’m sure there are plently of people who do that, but I definitely don’t.

The only thing you can do to these spammers is block them. But then, sometimes it’s hard to identify a Twitter spammer. First thing I do is to check how many people they are following. If it’s in the thousands, I generally call "spam". Another way to tell is if all they post are links to the same website over and over and nothing else. Whichever way you choose to look at it, the growing spam problem on Twitter is the beginning of more bad things to come to a seemingly innocent, and by far, the most honest and open social community around.

Obviously, the Twitter devs have an opportunity to nip some of these issues in the bud. Some of the other things that may be waiting on the horizon are things I am surprised I haven’t seen. Things like malicious postings, overdoing self promotion, and blatant product placement (Jason Calacanis has an opportunity to be a pioneer there if he so chooses. If you’re one of 25k followers of his, you might recall hearing about a Tesla roadster or Dash GPS.)

The good thing about Twitter right now, is that you get to choose the noise level. I choose to only follow a small number of people so the conversation is at least intelligible. I am VERY picky about who I follow. If you’re following a thousand people, you’re definitely missing things. If you’re following twenty five thousand people, what can you really read? Just random tweets. You might as well refresh the public timeline, no?  In that case, you’re a great talker, but a terrible listener.

There are plenty of people who have ridiculous amounts of followers. A lot of those people are having contests and races to see who gets the most followers. You might think that it’s an innocent race to the top for bragging rights, but I think otherwise. Scenario: You have amassed fifty thousand followers. Starbucks marketing contacts you and offers you $500 to mention that you just had a latte and link to their website. It’s going to happen, but is it a good or bad thing?

I think spammers, scammers, and other malicious beings are looming on the horizon of Twitter’s future. It’s all just more reasons I would be willing to pay for Twitter. I hope Twitter’s plans for development are faster and better than anything the "bad people" are cooking up. That goes for good people too. One of Twitter’s major problems lately has been the overloading of normal (not sure if "normal" Twitter usage has been or can be defined) usage as the user base grows and grows.

Twitter, my wallet is open for you whenever you’re ready to take some money.