Twitscoop Open To Gaming

I saw a couple of links to Twitscoop on FriendFeed earlier today and decided to take a look.

Twitscoop provides a tag cloud meme tracker and search functionality of Twitter activity.

The search works quite well, providing a graphical depiction of the frequency the selected term has been mentioned as well as providing a list of who and what was tweeted. You can are also able to select from 6 hours to 3 days for your search criteria.

As noted, Twitscoop includes a tag cloud on the landing page, which does what a tag cloud is meant to do, providing easily identifiable representation of the most frequently mentioned terms in tweets.

This is where the problem comes in. If you look at the top image again, you will see that the dominant tag there was for ‘thesagecommander‘. I had no idea what this was referring to, or why it should gain such prominence in tweets, so I clicked on the tag to see what it brought up.

Take a look at the image below and you will see just how this is open to gaming.

Because this user included the URL with each tweet, the domain name now became the most prominent tag in the tag cloud.

This should be fairly easy to rectify to prevent, but it does illustrate, the potential for gaming of the service