>> TWITTER SEC FILING SHOWS VAST NUMBERS OF BOTS

Remember when SPAM was just chopped pork, salt, water and modified potato starch?

There has always bean speculation about exactly how many twitter accounts are actually not human - now there is an SEC report stating exactly how many; and it is a scary number. Has the Internet of Things played a big role in boosting these numbers up? or did the company from the start inadvertently shoot themselves in the foot with an open API from the start?

In the report; they state:

• Our metrics are also affected by third-party applications that automatically contact our servers for regular updates with no user action involved ... In the three months ended June 30, 2014, approximately 11% of all active users solely used third-party applications to access Twitter. However, only up to approximately 8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action.

That is a whopping 8.5% that have absolutely no human interaction associated with tweets. Twitter themselves say they have 271 million active users - so that would represent around 23 million bots currently sending automated messages to the social network. Exactly how many of these are the result of IoT projects tweeting - can there be a metric for IoT?

While there are many twitter bots for public service such as for flooding (@floodalerts), earthquakes (@EarthquakesSF, @EarthquakesLA, @eqbot) and weather (@wunderground) - there are a number of sample IoT projects that show how to build your own tweeting devices.

I ran a story earlier specifically for a twitter like service for IoT (dweet.io) - if people are that concerned about IoT SPAM on twitter then maybe there should be a push to use a service such as dweet.io or, even setup a similar service using the same infrastructure.