Summary in under 140 characters:

If you go to someone’s Twitter page, you can now mark them as a spammer (under block xxxxxxxxxx)

Details, blog sized:

Here are the most annoying scenarios:

1) you follow someone, and they send you multiple DMs (Direct Messages) about

• a product they’re selling
• the fact that you have to read their blog
• something else you don’t want that wastes your time and could make them money

2) someone sends an @reply with your name in it, so you see it, but it is clearly directed to a bunch of people for no reason other than to get your attention and sell you something.  But

• you don’t know them
• you wouldn’t want to know them
• and if you go to their page, and that’s ALL they ever tweet about.

In the past, you could block them (on the right of their Twitter page under Actions), but there was no way to really feel like you were solving the problem.  You could solve it for yourself, but you couldn’t prevent these annoying gnats from bothering other people, and others couldn’t help to keep them away from you.

Boom – finally, Twitter has added a

“report RickieAuten for spam”

button.  It is located on someone’s Twitter page, on the right hand side, under Actions, and under the “block RickieAuten” button.  For instance, if you go to http://twitter.com/RickieAuten you can see that this is just a spammer trying to sell a product.  Dirtbag has ZERO followers and is following NO ONE, but sends @replies about his product.  On the right, under Actions, you can now report him for spam.  Bye, Rickie, you little pain in the ass gnat.

I just saw it for the first time today, (and I was blocking spammers last night, so it’s the first time it showed up for me), so I’m not sure what Twitter is going to do with it.  Hopefully, it means that Twitter will now use a counter to determine that a bunch of us considered someone a spammer, and Twitter will remove them.  It does give you a message that says “Reporting for spam will block and flag RickieAuten for review”.  OK.

Rickie should be flagged AND flogged.

If Twitter was really smart, they’d allow us to set a counter, so that we could say that we don’t want to follow someone or receive @replies from someone with more than 5 of these “report xxxxx for spam” clicks, for instance.  We could each decide if 5 is the right number, since some scumbags will certainly gang up and do this to their competitor’s accounts just to make their competitors look like spammers.  That’s a problem Twitter will have to solve down the road.

Now I have to decide whether to mark people as spammers if they send me a DM about

• joining their mafia family
• the TrueTwit validation service, which is spam of another kind

Hope this helps, and for those of you in the mafia, I’m not scared.