Quite often, people ask me this, either to my face, via Q&A, or in emails: how do I come up with truly unique, never-before-seen, shiny new ideas? What a question. It's a rare thing to come up with something that's really never been done before. Many of the novels on a bookstore's shelves contain stories that have been told before in one form or another. Real originality is fantastic, but there is plenty to be made from taking a good idea and putting a new spin on it and making it better.

One of the first tactics I came up with when creating linkbait was to think of a relatively basic idea and run its various keywords through search engines. There were usually at least a few examples of my idea already in existence. If the pre-cooked versions of my idea were good enough, I usually went on to something else. There is nothing worse than a rehashed version of an already-good idea. Searching for a vague content or concept showed me where my competition lay and how advanced it had already become. It was usually readily apparent whether I'd be able to compete or whether I was better off thinking of something else. I don't believe that this is cowardly of me; if you came across something like this, would you attempt to do it better?

Content is one thing, but entire website concepts are something else. To my mind, this seems even more difficult. As the person who went through the Web 2.0 nominees, I've seen a huge number of sites that attempt to do something new and exciting, as well as those who attempt to do an old concept better. Very few succeed.

This is because imitation, at least at a high level, is not as easy as it seems. Creating a barely-used Digg clone might not be hard, but inventing a functional competitor to Twitter that both Twitter fans and new users pick up (admittedly when Twitter was experiencing difficulties) is more difficult. I am not a fan of Plurk, but its features appeal to a growing number of people for a good reason. It did what Twitter couldn't do at a critical time (provide Twitter-like functions and stay up) as well as appeals to a new audience who'd never liked Twitter. That it was essentially a copycat really isn't a negative. Some of the best sites and products we have online were copies of other projects, but were done better.

I'd still argue that Twitter is far from beaten by its competitors, but once it fixes its downtime problem, it has a mountain of spam to cope with. Most Twitter users will have noticed that they've been inundated with new followers during the last few days. A great many of us don't really check out who has recently added us on Twitter, but we should. Sadly, in influx of people isn't because we've all suddenly become much more interesting. Clicking through to the profiles of the "people" who've started following us usually tells the real story: these accounts aren't human but are bots, scraping the public timeline for content. My latest example of such an account is that of "Lisa Starkin." Twitter will probably ban the account in time, so here's Google's cache and, when that goes, here is a sample of what Lisa has been saying recently:


"Her" latest update says "Catching Up With Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn Spears 17 years old is speaking out for the first time since gi http twurl nl 5fawn7" and is possibly more obviously fake than these above.

The amazing thing is, "Lisa" has 179 followers, many of whom do actually appear to be real people. The messages look real enough (especially considering some people's awful grammar) that 179 of the 1,458 people she's followed believed that she was a real-life, underwear-clad college student from San Francisco.

I see this as Twitter's main threat and the one that would spur me of if I were managing a competitor. I didn't have to look far in order to find more examples. Basically every new follower I've received in the last few days is fake. Experience shows that an out-of-control spam problem is a threat. On the surface, it makes no difference to my interactions on the site, aside from putting even more strain on Twitter's servers. However, look at MySpace: even those of us who never suffered from its outrageous spam problem will still cite spam as one of the things we don't like about it, and will praise whichever service we moved to for its lack of the problem.

Twitter seems to be good at deleting the very obvious examples of spam, such as "sarah2323" and "heysexy", both of whom had one thing to say: "What do you think babe? Anne tried it and it worked. Testing it at d mo. Catch u late hon. http://www.the6figureteam.com." "Sarah" attracted quite a few followers, including people who should have known better. Both of these accounts were gone within a day, but the content-scrapers live on.

There are various theories about what the owners of these spam networks intend to achieve, one of which states that they're all pointing followed links (i.e., profile links) to a queen account, which will in turn point at an external site. This would have worked a lot better before all Twitter links became nofollowed, although with some engines' ongoing trouble with nofollow and the fact that some still use nofollowed links for discovery, there could still be an ounce of merit in the idea.

There is definitely nothing wrong with having a go at established businesses, websites, or services, but being as good as they are isn't enough. Facebook is successful because it was better at social networking at MySpace. If Plurk or FriendFeed are to succeed on a mass large scale, they have to be at least slightly better at serving feeds, information sharing, and "microblogging" than Twitter. They have the distinct advantage of being able to learn from Twitter's mistakes and steal its good ideas, which is the more irritating part of the imitation / flattery game.

I don't know what goes on in Twitter's offices, but it seems like they're working very hard to improve speed and uptime with regular maintenance. I also don't know how much strain the spam is putting on the service, but it certainly can't be helping. In order to combat the possibility of spam becoming more prevalent than content at Twitter, I'd be working hard to remove all of these accounts as quickly as possible. If I were a competitor, I'd be putting some big road blocks in place to ensure that the spam doesn't transfer over to my business instead.