Twitter is an amazing platform that is revolutionizing the way we communicate and discuss our lunch plans. That being said, there are several trends that are posed to kill this birdy. Ok, maybe kill is a tad dramatic, but they certainly make things less desirable for someone like myself.

So without further ado, I give you the top 5 things ruining Twitter right now.

ReTweeting

Holy hell is retweeting out of control or what? Twitter is quickly becoming a massive link dump for blogs and spammers galore. People are going as far as to “shake up” their friends for retweets via direct message. It reminds me of that old men’s bathroom tip, if you’re retweeting more than 3 times a day, you’re playing with it. Be mindful of your retweet noise levels, and only reach out for a retweet when it’s really worth it. And really think twice next time before retweeting that Mashable article.

Avatar Soapboxing

Changing your avatar to reflect the strife of the week is pretty silly. I say this not to devalue the importance of these events (Iran, for example), but I’m sick of my Twitter stream running green, black, or whatever else. If you want make a stand donate your time and money to it, or go throw a rock in someones face. Tell me the story through your tweets and links, not a colored overlay.

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a brilliant service that takes any RSS feed and posts the results to Twitter. Used by lots of bloggers (myself included) it’s a great way to auto post your latest entries. Only problem is just about every spammer bot also uses this service to blast crap and pollute Twitter. They take random RSS feeds, pipe them through Twitterfeed and presto, an automated birdie. I think Twitterfeed should go to a paid model right now (I’m happy to pay) and eliminate 90% of the crap coming into the stream.

Spam

Yes spam, of course this is an issue, now more so than ever. I can tell you having seen the entire “MySpace Marketing” movement come and go (I even wrote a book on it), this is going to really hurt Twitter. Both from an infrastructure standpoint and user experience, spam really kills it. I’m not sure how many people Twitter HQ has monitoring spam but they should probably double it, and more proactivly delete accounts and ban IPs.

Follow Friday

I actually think Follow Friday is a fine idea, but with any good idea it usually becomes warped and stupid. Truth is most of you are doing it wrong. Sometimes I get included in #FF post and click through to see who gave me a mention. There I find there dump of other #FF tweets, blasting out some 20 names at a time with no context what-so-ever. Why should I follow them? Because you said so? Just do me a favor, click through here to read about Follow Friday from its creator, and learn how to do it right.

What do you think is ruining Twitter?