I’ve noticed an increase in the number of spammy companies, random websites, and unrealistically endowed women following me on Twitter. It’s a simple form of spam: by following me on Twitter, spammers know that Twitter will send me an email with a link to their Twitter user account, which will encourage me to click and figure out who they are.

A simple feature request will remedy this problem. If the followee/follower ratio on a Twitter account is greater than 15x (ie: if a user is following 151 people, but only 10 people follow that user), then an email message should NOT be generated when that account follows someone new. So, you can still create an account that follows 10,000 people, but only the couple multiples of 15 will be bugged by an email notification.

I like this solution (and think it makes good fodder for a blog post) because it uses the implicit usage data of the service as a filter to improve the service. It’s an example of how capturing as much data as possible about users’ actions can help shape and improve a web service through iterative design.