Lately, though, I’ve been seeing an increase in twittering of dubious value. For example, automatically following (or stalking, as Ari Herzog put it) folks who mention a given term, and overly friendly twitter accounts purporting to be young women who want you to see their ‘special’ photos on other sites. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s also seen lots of new followers whose usernames look suspiciously like they were generated by a script – JohnSmith18273, JaneDoe45039.

This week, for example, Ann from MarketingProfs mentioned that her dogs – King Charles Cavalier Spaniels – are staying with my wife and I while she’s out of town. Then rt_cavs retweeted it:

Indiscriminate Retweeting

The problem, of course, is that her dogs have nothing to do with the Cleveland Cavaliers. I don’t think Cavs fans are so enthralled with their team as to be interested in the dogs, or the cars, or any of the other things cavalier might mean.

When keyword matching twitterbots are at their best, they can broadcast tweets of interest to a broader community who might otherwise not have seen it. In cases like this, though, they just reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

Photo by Andrea Mercado

Thanks to Karen Huffman (@slakm) who raised some issues she was having with an installation of ReTweeter, I’ve tracked down the bug and uploaded and released 0.9.1.

Turns out that in late December of 2008, the Twitter API servers started sending a 417 Status Code response to many clients, including ReTweeter. (See Alex Payne’s announcement on the Twitter API Google Group and this message from Tom Morris which identified the necessary fix for CURL based clients).

In addition to squashing that bug, this update also better handles error responses from the Twitter API in general, which is to say it actually identifies to the user what status code was returned to enable better troubleshooting.

Remember to copy your settings from your old version before overwriting with the new.