University of California, Santa Barbara researchers have introduced a free spam filtering service for Twitter.

"The service, dubbed Spamdetector, is the brainchild of Ph.D. student Gianluca Stringhini," writes eWeek's Brian Prince.

"'We started studying social network spam one year ago,' Stringhini said. 'With the rise of social network sites, this problem became really important. During our studies, we found out that spam bots (which are likely infected computers) have some peculiar behaviors that [differ] from the [ones] legitimate users have,'" Prince writes.

Click here to read the eWeek article.