Twitter is popular.
Twitter has a simple and powerful API.
Twitter displays @cocaman on a special page.
These three points are enough to make the @reply option vulnerable. Chris Messina, Chief Open Source Advocate and BarCamp co-inventor, recently updated his “my-name-is” homepage. My camichel.com site is very much influenced by his old design.
I had a question about the location he shows in site and if it is automated. So I tweeted him my question.
Short after that Chris answered. So I checked my @cocaman replies and I see this:
Two stupid bots responded as well. The bit.ly link just points to Chris’ answer. I have no idea why they are doing that. At least the ciwin_cui account looks legit, but the scifichrome definitly is not.
If now bots/people are randomly @reply tweets of other people, the system will break. There is no need to do that! I will see my @cocaman replies, you do not need to repeat them!
Popularity: 2% [?]
Geek. Projects. Software. 
there are bots that @reply if you mention specific keywords (not hashtags) in your tweet. last time I tweeted about the webspace transfer a bot @replied with a list of the top 10 webspace providers. and guess what: I didn’t know any of the webspace providers. the biggest problem of twitter will always be spam! I don’t know why they don’t block the public timeline (located at http://twitter.com/public_timeline).
This really will be a problem if this starts to repeat itself exponentially (as I’m afraid I guess it will). But – what could Twitter do against this? (closing replies down to friends is no good option)
@giu guess it is not as simple as blocking public timeline. Those bots are following people and therefore do not need to parse the public timeline. And I think your webspace example is good because it shows, that they are actively tracking keywords.
@Sam I know. But I think this will destroy Twitter. When I joined Twitter in March of 2007 I knew all Swiss twitteres
This is a problem because it became so popular. They just need to do a better job blocking the bots. Imagine the Google results being full of spam. They handled that pretty well.