Recently my email inbox has been filling up with messages from Twitter saying the “xxx has requested to follow you on Twitter”. This was mysterious because (a) in most cases I didn’t know the people allegedly making these requests; and (b) my Twitter updates are ‘protected’ — i.e. visible only to those I’m allowing to follow me. The solution to puzzle (a) is that most of these ‘requests’ are from people who hope I will visit their websites in order to check on their identities — so the requests are, in a way, a form of spam. (And, as such, doomed to fail.) I’m still slightly puzzled by (b). I guess people discover I’m on Twitter by finding me on someone else’s followed/following list. So the trick is to pick a Twitter ‘hub’ like Stephen Fry or Rory Cellan-Jones and then ransack his list for spam targets.