Is Twitter Powerless Against Spam?

An interesting thing has happened to one of the weekly educators' Twitter chats that I attend: We've got SPAM! Over the past two or three weeks, what started as just a smattering of spam has turned into an all-out onslaught of off-topic, lewd, and derogatory images and tweets. However, we are educators - which means we love to solve problems. Our (awesome) moderators quickly chose a new platform, Google+, and those who already had an account were able to switch over easily.

Obviously, these incidents raise a few questions from the people involved, myself included:

• Is Twitter powerless against spammers? 
• Is Google+ a viable platform alternative for weekly professional development chats? 
• How can we merge the professional learning network developed on the original platform with Google+?
• Will we eventually have the same spam issue on Google+?

I am so excited to have an amazing professional learning network and am in awe of the work that they do. They will not be derailed by spammers. They will continue to meet weekly. They will continue to collaborate online. The only question is, which platform will we use?

Get it together, Twitter. We've got our eyes on Google+.

UPDATE: After weeks of intrusive posts by spammers, the most recent #satchat was nearly spam-free! So, the answer to my first question, is Twitter powerless against spammers, is no! Twitter has the power to stop the spam. I am interested to learn how it was addressed, and how much effort our moderators had to put into the effort. As far as the other two questions regarding Google+, I am still exploring how it can be used to continue my efforts to grow my professional learning network.

TodaysMeet for Twitter Basics

There are some amazing resources online for teachers who would like to get started using Twitter, but aren't quite sure how. When I first started using Twitter,  I would begin to read these blogs and get completely overwhelmed. How would I have time to tweet if I couldn't find the time to finish reading an article about tweeting?

Here I will put together some Twitter basics then explain how I have used todaysmeet to teach twitter basics to middle school students..

Create an Account

As always, create your account. Go to twitter - the link brings you directly to a page on which you can create an account. If you are trying to brand yourself, you will want to use a name that is recognizable and consistent with your brand. Same goes with your profile picture. Think before you create: This is how you are building your digital footprint. What footprint do you want to have?

Hashtags

Hashtags are user generated shortcuts so you can get right to the types of tweets (twitter posts) that you want to read. Including them in your tweets means that like-minded tweeps (Twitter + peeps = tweeps, your people on twitter!) can find your tweets easily as well. They look like #edchat (which is a great hashtag for teachers to search for).