It’s pretty simple: sending someone a commercial message when you do not have their permission to do so is spam. It’s a message they did not ask for or request.

The challenge of course is trying to follow the right people and then make sure you are not getting a stream full of SPAM.  There is a way I’ve discovered though that tends to alleviate this issues.  My experience is that spammers are using automation tools to send tweets to twitter on regular intervals.  It’s automated SPAM!  What I have discovered though is that most of these tweets come through the twitter API and the source of these tweets are indicated in the stream as a source called ‘web’.

Now ‘web’ also means someone who went to the twitter web site and updated their status, now to be honest anyone using twitter like that is perhaps someone I don’t necessarily want to hear from, so doing the following filters alot of the automated tweets as well as those using the web to update.

Now to do this you’ll need TweetDeck, an excellent tool for managing your relationship with twitter streams, more on this later.  Then you’ll need to modify your filter on the ‘all friends’ column by adding an exclusion for the source of  ‘web’.

Like so…