Twitter Lists - A spammers new best friend?

So I am one of the lucky guys who ended up with early access to the Twitter Lists functionality and so far I am loving it.  Not necessarily from a functionality standpoint (it’s really bare bones but at Klout we are building some cool stuff to make it more useful) but from a data perspective.  Everyone has always been obsessed with follower count (huge mistake in my opinion) but now the first thing you’ll notice with lists is that the count of lists you are on is displayed right next to your follower count.

Someone adding you to a list is way more meaningful then just a follow.  Not sure yet if Twitter is going to email you when you are added to a list but it would be hard not to click through and see what lists you are on when that number increments.  What happens though when a spammer creates a “50 People Who Should Visit My Online Pharmacy” or “People I Can Teach to Get Rich From the Comfort of their Home” list and adds you to it?

Almost every person I speak to who is relatively new Twitter asks “who are these people that are following me?”.  A stat I once heard from the Twitter team is that a spammer lasts about 8 hours in their system (this was a while ago so I am sure it has improved greatly).  It’s funny that I think lists were created to combat these spammers and improve the signal to noise ratio of Twitter.  I do think lists will help in surfacing interesting content but I believe it adds a new channel for spammers to annoy the rest of us.