Twitter is dead

It is my sad news this morning to report the demise of the world's most famous microblog. Twitter, we hardly knew ye.

From a distance it appears to be healthy enough. It's still growing faster than kudzu in a rain forest. The number of Twitter users surged a staggering 1,700 percent since last year. More than 20 million people visited Twitter.com in July, according to Comscore. Some (not so) poor slobs just dropped another $100 million into its profitless coffers, boosting the paper value of the company past the $1 billion mark.

IT industry graveyard

[ Also on InfoWorld, Cringely has more thoughts on Twitter's twisty tale: "Twitter harpooned, Internet survives (just barely)" | Stay up to date on Robert X. Cringely's musings and observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

I especially love this line from the IDG news report: "The money will give Twitter more time to figure out a business model." Hey, if somebody wanted to give me $100 million, I'd be happy to spend my time working out a business model -- preferably from a beach chair in the Caymans.

More than 3 million people now hang on every 140-character belch that comes from the keyboard of Ashton Kutcher. (Though, aside from shacking up with Demi Moore, it's unclear what he's done to deserve all the attention. Have you ever watched "That 70's Show?" I mean, more than once?) When The Gloved One died in July, researchers recorded 80 tweets per second mourning the loss of MJ. There are now academic studies of varying ridiculousness about the impact of "Twitter influencers." There's not one but two TV shows that are allegedly being built around Twitter. (Of course, in TV land they'd build a program around your grandmother's dead cat -- and it would still be better than "That 70's Show.")

So no worries, right? Wrong.

Twitter is dead because it is now so popular that the spammers and the scammers have arrived in force. And history tells us that once they sink their teeth into something, they do not let go. Ever.

Twitter scams aren't new. But I've never seen so many hit in a single week or with such rigorous precision.

First there's the "ROFL" phishing scam that drives users to a fake log-in page to steal their credentials. Per IDG News' Bob McMillan:

The scam begins with a direct message -- one sent directly between two Twitter users -- that reads "ROFL this you on here?" and appears to link to a video site. When the victim clicks on the link, however, they are sent to a fake Twitter page and asked to log in. The scammers use that log-in information to automatically message the victim's contacts with the same direct message.

Why would a scammer want your Twitter logon? Because he/she needs to borrow your Twitter reputation for a little while -- just long enough to spew out spammy messages that send hapless twits to other Web pages where the scammers can abuse you further.

I've run into two other Twitter scams that have not been widely reported. They may not be new, but they both hit me over the same two days, and they're kind of similar.

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