I just noticed that “Oct 2008 12″ is a trending topic on search.twitter.com… check out the feed of people sending out tweets with nothing but the following text:

“What a day . Wed, 08 Oct 2008″

At first I thought this was just some random thing but then I realized that a lot of the accounts sounded pretty spam-focused and it hit me: Twitter Spam (‘Twam’?) is now legit. Lots of people have questioned the validity of twitter spam in the past because spammers could not create a long-term benefit from it. They could create as many fake profiles as they want but they will never get anything more than maybe an initial traffic spike generated by people getting “You have been followed by ____” emails and checking out their new contact. After that, they would just be stuck with a profile and its 4 followers.

But now, someone came up with the rather brilliant idea of harnessing groups of these accounts and sending out identical messages in order to show up as a trending topic. (see screenshot below) It is not a perfect model but it still has the potential to pull in a few thousand views from people checking out the pulse of twitter. Now spammers can send out a thousand updates with a specific keyword and either an ad message or a link, resulting in either a few thousand clicks or a few thousand impressions for each mass tweeting.

I am not convinced of the long-term viability of such a model, but it seems like it could work for now since the trending topics feature is just an automated data aggregator. Its also pretty impressive that before twitter itself has developed a solid revenue or monetization scheme, spammers have already figured out how to pull in views, clicks and impressions by simply using the tools twitter already provides.

I wonder how long it will take for users to overrun the ‘trending topics’ feature with advertising: either spammers or real users collaborating to manipulate the network.

UPDATE: I just realized that it could just be a twitter glitch displaying the timestamp for tweets, but the volume then would be much higher.  Also, if you now go to the trending topics page for “What a day . Wed, 08 Oct 2008″, and then click to view any of the tweets listed there, you get twitter’s 404 error.  Very odd… either twitter is deleting these or some spmamer got a hold of a lot of people’s login credentials, tweeted on their behalf and then the user deleted the fake tweet.  Thoughts?