My New Spam: Twitter, Disqus & Vimeo

I get plenty of email spam... but Gmail does an admirable job making sure most of it doesn't hit my inbox. My new annoyance is, for lack of better terminology, "web 2.0 spam". My inbox is filled with junk from Twitter, Disqus, Vimeo and all of the other services that I use frequently... all getting increasingly worse (particularly over the last two weeks).. It's brutally annoying because, unlike email, this spam is usually visible to more than just my eyes. Whereas email spam clogs *my* inbox - these new forms of spam affect my public arenas... sometimes for personal content (like my blog) and other times for company content (like InGameNow, Widgetbox, etc).

And as services like Twitter and Disqus continue to grow - the spammers get more sophisticated because the value of spamming increases. It's no longer Viagra and Acai Berry ads - it's silly link-bait being used clearly for SEO purposes. Unfortunately that too is problematic in ways that traditional spam isn't... enough SEO spam can have negative affect on my sites as well.

Twitter Spam

New SocialFeed Widget (...Your FriendFeed Widget-ized)

Yesterday Scoble unveiled his new blog theme and the resounding feedback among the 150+ comments was positive... and how'd he create that FriendFeed widget? For those web 2.0 users, Widgetbox has a new widget that aggregates your social content - we're calling it the SocialFeed Widget. The widget is completely configurable.

Configurations - set the widget's size - choose the theme (currently 6 available) - select your web 2.0 sites and input your username (Flickr, Last.fm, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Digg and Delicious) - set your font size and feed size - input your widget's header and name

Of course you can create your own SocialFeed and embed it within your blog's sidebar as a promotional tool and traffic driver... or you can configure your SocialFeed to showcase content from popular power-users (like Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, etc).