The Direct Message Spam – getting messages from people that they are following is troubling John Reese and Mike Filasmi and they have unfollowed recently nearly 80,000 people on their Twitter accounts because of this. The way Twitter is heading they are not the only ones.

The biggest problem with Twitter is their “Trends “which is continuously spammed by different applications and stupid quizzes.  In my opinion, that is not what Trends portion of Twitter is meant for. In all honesty this facility is meant for sharing important information about offline and online happenings. Personally this is not a problem for me as I am following a different stance for Twitter use with other people to deal with direct message “spam”.

The strategy of “follow me, follow you” used by many Twits is gaining far more followers, which in my opinion is satisfying their “ego” as to show they have X numbers of followers. Although there is nothing wrong in that, I consider Twitter is not the place.

Just like John and Mike there are other two Twits  – @ChrisBrogan and @Pro Blogger. These two are also getting a lot of Direct Message “spam”. Darren at Pro Blogger is following everyone back and so he opens up Direct Message communications. But this only allows his account to be hit with number of Direct Messages from numerous third party applications including http://www.fun140.com to advertise their products.

So it is time for Twitter to think seriously about what they are doing, as otherwise they will be losing a lot of users very quickly. Already Twitter is losing respect among their influential and most loyal users.

What you think Twitter is doing and what is your Twitter Strategy? Pour your comments in the comments section if you really feel Twitter Is Losing Respect.

While writing on a company blog, Sean Suchter, general manager of Silicon Valley Search Technology Center of Microsoft quipped that for the time being Microsoft is indexing “few thousand people, primarily based on follower count they have and their volume of tweets”.

It appears that the company is not working directly with Twitter, towards delivering this capability. Suchter wrote that this is their first step in using Twitter’s public API, to bring up Tweets for the people while searching.

As it reflects popular public sentiment, there has been an increased interest in the content value of Twitter, from the search community worldwide. Wednesday’s launch of this new capability in Bing seems to be a coup, albeit limited, because the other major search engines are not indexing recent Twitter messages anyway.

The practice is most of the existing search engines, at best, turn up old Twitter messages and a link to a Twitter page of the concerned person is displayed. This has been changed by Bing of Microsoft, by listing recent individual messages along with other search results. However Suchter cautioned some users may not see the messages in Twitter now, as the new future is scheduled to roll out gradually.

Incidentally, the arrival of this new capability of Bing falls on the same day, when a new study showed Bing’s growth chart is steady upwards, at the expense of most popular Google search engine. According to Researchers at StateCounter, Bing has definitely increased the share of Microsoft in the search market, by 1 percent in June in the United States. This shows Bing is still behind Yahoo search engine and way back in the lead by Google though. StateCounter found Google still has a market share of 78.48 percent, although shedding some market share to Bing during the month.

Facebook, the renowned social-networking site and very popular amongst netizens have made a thrilling announcement late Friday as well as early Saturday. They are going to offer the chance of claiming a personalized Web address, by any of their 200 million users worldwide. This will be available on First-Come First-Served basis and so better you join the already lengthy Queue at your earliest.

The new facility is revolutionary in that Facebook users can create their own online address distinctly and put their personal profile as they choose, like Facebook.com/nehasingh.  What is more they can make use of this Facebook page allotted as their personal home page and fill it with whatever info they want – advertise business; introduce to others; and tell the world whatever they want to.  MySpace is already doing this.

This announcement caught up many Facebook members late night as a surprise, and many of them changed their plans for Friday night to settle down grabbing the chance, before others do.

Scott Roewer, a professional Organizer in Washington D.C. wants to say that he is a sole proprietor and so he finds this very useful to promote his business and signed up quick at midnight. He is already making use of Facebook and Twitter in this regard.

Bryan Christmas, 27, another Facebook member said “I wanted to make sure that I had Internet access in San Francisco at 9.01 pm to spend few precious minutes on this. I have altered my week end plans”.

Facebook says that the intention of “vanity URLs” is to make easy finding of profiles when searched, instead of a sequence of numbers being used presently, to locate Facebook profiles. The new facility virtually means grabbing of land space in Facebook as no one can make use of a similar name, entered by someone else. When the name is confirmed it can not be changed either.

What the legal experts say about “vanity URLs” is it might lead to disputes in Court room for trademark rights, in some cases. For example, if a third-party registers the name of a brand or celebrity inadvertently, it will create problems.

Howard Weller, a trademark attorney in New York, representing celebrities says it could be a quagmire (a situation or predicament from which it is difficult to extricate oneself) and would lead to cases of cybersquatting – individuals squatting and claiming domain names in an effort to sell them for big profits, as happened when Internet came into being.

It should be remembered that Tony La Russa, baseball manager sued Twitter, the social networking site last week, as he found somebody used his name in unauthorized profile.

Facebook is confident about preventing cybersquatting, by taking adequate steps of restricting tens of thousands of names, inclusive of well known brand names and companies, politicians, celebrities etc. Additionally, Larry Yu, spokesman of Facebook says that its members will be allowed to submit requests for several days, in respect of terms objectionable to them.

Further safeguards taken by Facebook are – it won’t allow transfer of names registered by its members to others and claiming a name will be allowed to its users, who already have an account prior to the announcement of this special feature on June 9. However this restriction will be lifted on 28th June.

Larry Yu is confident that Facebook is not sure about how many people will be opting for this feature, but they have taken sufficient steps to ensure the service of the site is not affected adversely.