• Bloomberg News, Friday, April 17, 2009 12:15 PM

Are marketers ruining the Twitter experience? Bloomberg talks to several people who think so. One woman, who says she signed up for Twitter to keep in touch with friends, is now considering discontinuing her use of the microblogging service because random marketers keep contacting her. Home Depot, for example, wished her luck painting her room, a medical company recommended a device for helping her with her ear infection, and a DJ recently told her to check out his new single. "I don't want random people contacting me," she said. "Don't try to sell yourself through my Twitter."

Christopher Peri, founder of TwittFilter, which lets Twitter users restrict who can follow their updates, agrees. "It is starting to get out of control," he said. "The original value of Twitter is friends talking to friends. When someone says, 'I'm going to pimp this product,' it's no longer a social media." Meanwhile, the microblogging service continues to grow like a weed. According to the most recent data from comScore, visitors to Twitter.com increased to 9.31 million in March, compared to just 524,000 last year. And the more Twitter grows, the more companies are interested in reaching its users.

Most approaches to using the site are not intrusive, but some companies are using it solely to send unsolicited marketing messages. Twitter tried to stamp out the problem earlier this month by disabling a feature that allows users to automatically follow people who follow them. "Spam will always be an issue that requires attention," co-founder Biz Stone said. "Our goal is to stay ahead of spam and keep the user experience great for folks on Twitter."

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