^[1] During the past few months Twitter’s popularity has virtually exploded. According to the Comscore Twitter attracted 44.5 million unique visitors during the month of July. Unfortunately all the attention has also had an undesirable effect – the increase in the number of spammers on Twitter.

The mad rush for gaining followers had prompted many users to employ auto-follow bots. So far, Twitter has done precious little to deal with these auto-follow scripts and software. TrueTwit is a new service which offers a simple solution to the problem of spammy followers. Whenever someone follows you, TrueTwit will send him a message on your behalf. Your followers will be requested to validate their identity by filling in a CAPTCHA form. This is a really simple technique which makes it possible to easily distinguish the genuinely interested twitter users from the spammers.

TrueTwit is an interesting service with a lofty goal. However, it does have its shortcomings. It is ridiculously simple to bypass TrueTwit validation. All you need to do is go ahead and register yourself at TrueTwit. On top of that there is no guarantee that every human user is going to take the trouble of filling in a CAPTCHA form and validate themselves. Also due to rampant DM spam, many users completely ignore Direct Messages. While TrueTwit’s intentions are commendable, it is at best a sketchy solution. Unfortunately, it may remain the best solution till Twitter wakes up and does something about the growing amount of spam.