I was thinking about this, and its only a matter of time- or maybe its already happened- to have companies using natural language parsing bots that locate relevant tweets, make analysis and either reply automatically, or generate proposed tweet spam that is quickly reviewed by "paid tweeters".

Spam is everywhere, that's for certain. Twitter does not even have a simple captcha system for signups, so there is a lot of gaming going on as far as I can see.

But as you point out, there are lots of positive uses too- like everything on the net, I think in the long run quality will win out.

Thanks for the comment!

Interesting point was that many companies now have PR staff or consultants who have a full-time job on twitter. One guy talked about a local telco, who had a couple of staff looking for tweets about the opposition (telco) service. If they saw a possible 'switch' opportunity then they would jump in and say something like "yeah, I had that problem & switched to service Y which is far better. You should do that"

I have issues with this; Twitter is great when I see a developer talking about what works for them but if the tweet is a paid for advert then how can I know it is real? This is more like email spam, instead of companies listening to customers talking via twitter and learning from it.

I can only imagine how much time/money MS is putting into Twitter to get the cloud you see. Perhaps they should just buy the company?