Over the last few days I’ve pursued my idea to build a “Twitter spammer detector” of sorts using only client-side technologies. I didn’t feel like setting up server components at all.
What was it supposed to do? It should check the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between those. If the person is following more than 1000 people (can be customised), and has a Following-to-Followers ratio higher than 1:1 (can be customised), you’d be informed (by a handy “Block” link).
Thanks to Pipes, the YUI libraries and the Twitter API returning JSON, I was able to finish the first version of Twitter Twerp Scan in a relatively short period of time.
My Javascript-fu is still a bit weak, but getting better. It’s a nice change to only have one local file to work with (excluding CSS, of course).
Over the weekend, the traffic to that page increased quite a bit, mostly because several people liked the idea enough to link the site.
I’ve set up a Twitter account for service updates etc. – twerpscan. The rest of my tweets will go to Carlo as usual.
