07/22/2009

Rarefied Technologies Announces Public Demo of Realtime Twitter Spam Filter

ALBUQUERQUE—June 22, 2009—Rarefied Technologies today announced the public demo of its highly-anticipated BotKiller software for Twitter. The demo uses Twitter's spritzer feed as a data source and tags spam tweets in realtime. BotKiller utilizes Rarefied Technologies' advanced probabilistic and statistical methods to recognize computer-generated content and can tag or block those messages, which have already started to become a major problem for the popular service.

Rarefied’s patent-pending method of message parsing identifies machine-generated content quickly and with precision. It differs from existing spam filters because of its ability to do deep analysis of the metadata within messages, finding the relationship of the message author to the greater conversation he or she is a part of. This allows the software to tag messages that might fool even a human moderator. The demo is online at http://twitter.bot-killer.com.

"I spent five minutes looking at a tweet that I was sure had been mistakenly tagged as spam," said Gabriel Ortiz, founder of Rarefied Technologies. "But BotKiller got it right—it did in a tenth of a second what took me five minutes."

Currently, the filter demo is processing about 5.5 tweets per second and tagging approximately 3.5% of those as spam. Accuracy is currently estimated at 96% and should become significantly better over time.

Twitter is an important emerging communications medium, and spammers have been quick to exploit it. Its emphasis on timeliness makes manual moderation impractical when response times can lag minutes or hours behind reports of spam. BotKiller can perform a more effective evaluation in a small fraction of the time. As Twitter's popularity increases, it will only become more attractive as a medium for spam, possibly overwhelming most content and search results. BotKiller makes such abuse significantly more difficult by recognizing emergent behavior of spam bot accounts, recognizing patterns such as posting frequency, the age of the account in question and the followers to following ratio. The business opportunities for Rarefied's classification platform are immense in the rapidly growing realtime web content market.

StupidFilter creator Gabriel Ortiz founded Rarefied Technologies a year ago to develop the StupidFilter and related projects. Rarefied quickly obtained venture capital financing from Flywheel Ventures. Since then, the company has focused on re-purposing their advanced text classification software to address the problem of web spam. Rarefied developers have greatly expanded the capabilities and performance of the software far beyond the original focus.

Press Contacts:

Rarefied Technologies Public Relations 505.903.6478 pr@rarefiedtech.com

Older press releases: Rarefied Technologies Announces Public Beta of StupidFilter Language Processing Software