Twitterspam is here, and it’s as brutal as the early days of Usenet and later, email.

We’re marketers. We don’t mind marketing messages. But Twitter Hijacking? Oh, that’s another story.

Nasty folks are using a dot com name so that their Twitter id is abc123.com.    Almost every email client converts such addresses to a live hyperlink.   The person then follows you, generating an email to you with their Twitter id.  If you click the link,  you’ll end up on their site instead of at their Twitter profile.

The tactic is a silly and lazy way to bring people to a site while being morally ambiguous at best.    Unfortunately, these types of tricks work best at huge scale and with a variable cost approaching zero, are ROI generators to the nth degree.