Avoid Twitter Spam With Text Expansion

If you’re sick of getting 10 “Click here to get a free iPad!” replies on Twitter every time you mention your iPad or iPhone, weblog TUAW has a great solution: use text expansion to tweak spam-inducing words in your Twitter client.

TJ Luoma over at TUAW explains:

If you post to Twitter and say the word “iPhone” or “iPad,” you are likely to get hit with one of the rash of Twitter spammers who search through Twitter for people who post about those terms and @reply to them with some “deal” (usually offering you a chance to “win” a “free” iPad or iPhone).

I have been trying to remember to not say those words on Twitter, or to spell them differently, such as “iPxd” or “iPhxne,” or use “lookalike” characters such as “¡Phone” (that’s an inverted “!” instead of an “i”). I keep forgetting, though, and every time I do—wham! I get more spam.

So I finally decided to let my computer do the thinking for me. I created a new “Group” in TextExpander, and I told it to only expand in Twitterrific (my desktop Twitter app of choice). Then I created two shortcuts: “ipad” and “iphone” and told TextExpander to ignore the case (so if I type “iPhone” or “iphone” it will match both).

Not all text expansion programs will necessarily let you specify applications for different expansions, but if you’re using one like TextExpander or TypeIt4Me, this is a really nice trick. Plus, this can obviously apply to more than just the iPad — anything that seems to be triggering spam can be put into your text expansion program of choice.

Use TextExpander and Twitterrific to avoid Twitter spam [TUAW]