Huge Amounts Of Twitter Spam Rendering Twitter Totally Useless

So for the last couple of days there would appear to be larger amounts of Twitter spam appearing and when I logged into my account and my latest 53 @niallharbison messages were all spam replies linking to porn sites. I have heard a few people complaining about this problem but it would appear that the problem is ramping up massively. This has always been one of Twitter’s huge open highways to spam in my opinion as anybody can @reply somebody and if Twitter don’t do something very quickly the bots are going to take over (they have already deemed my account useless) and make twitter pointless for everybody. The sad thing about this is that the only obvious solution would be to remove the ability to @reply somebody you don’t know which would be a major change to the twitter service but something has to be done fast.