Spam, the tasty Tweet; or, how not to make friends

Is it just me or is Twitter suddenly experiencing a much, much heavier spam deluge than usual? And how evil is it for the spam brigades to target a service than can barely function under normal human traffic loads?

To recap -- because it may seem peculiar to speak of spam on a service that operates as a de facto whitelist for each user -- here's how they seem to be doing it:

1. Unknown party follows you (and me and everybody we know);
2. Twitter alerts you (etc) that unknown party is following and gives you a link to see if you'd like to reciprocate;
3. You (etc), feeling the usual cultural pressure to run up one's friendship numbers and experiencing some vague idea that reciprocity is a nice thing to do, agree to follow unknown party;
4. Unknown party ... turns out to be all too well-known.

Fortunately, kicking a spammer to the curb on Twitter is as easy as ceasing to follow them, though I don't have a lot of hope that doing so will make them stop (remember when Roger Ebert and other Web columnists put out the call for folks to stop buying from spammers, so the spammers would stop bothering us? yeah, that worked out). Still, if paring down the garbage causes even one less flight of the Fail Whale, I feel I will have done some good in the world.