This is great news for Twitter users (like me and The Blog Herald)! Twitter have been marking accounts as spam, but the practice have been a bit weird to say the least:

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

The excellent Jesse Stay broke the story (also on TechCrunch and Techmeme), and found the confirmation that spam accounts would be suspended on the Twitter Dev mailing list.

Luckily, Twitter won’t just suspend spammer account to the left and right, they’ll contact them first to give them a chance to state their case, which is a good thing.

Jesse also points to a new feature in the API, the “since” variable, something that a lot of stand-alone applications and services will find useful, I believe:

Now, with the “since” variable, I can keep a tally of when I last checked your following/follower ratio and only do a request on those friends that have followed you since the last check. I can now go from checking those you follow on a daily basis, to checking almost every minute!

For more in-depth coverage, check out Jesse’s post.